AWS CDK Cloud Development Kit
Define AWS infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Java, C# or Go. cdk synth compiles the code into CloudFormation templates that are then deployed as usual.
Released in 2019. The building blocks are constructs, in three levels: L1 is a raw one-to-one mapping to CloudFormation resources, L2 adds sensible defaults and helper methods (bucket.grantRead(lambda) writes the IAM policy for you), L3 are ready-made patterns for whole architectures. The win is loops, conditionals, type checking and reuse — all painful in YAML. The price is that debugging happens through a generated intermediate layer, and that CloudFormation's slow, occasionally stuck stack updates are still the reality underneath. The Terraform equivalent is CDKTF; Pulumi solves the same problem without CloudFormation.