Many of us now believe that CloudFormation is best described as the assembly language of AWS infrastructure: you can hand-code it, but it's challenging and verbose, and there's a lot of detail you have to get involved in.
CDK is the high-level solution to this challenge. With CDK you describe your infrastructure in terms of high-level constructs such as classes. Your stacks are described as applications instead of YAML templates. You can use many different programming languages including TypeScript and Python, and code is reusable. You can even vendor custom construct libraries to share within your org, or openly via npm.
I've become a convert since CDK came out - it's been ages since I've handwritten CloudFormation templates.
