Using multiple environments AWS CLI and profiles with CDK

by Rehan Haider, Sun 12 January 2025 Category: AWS Academy

So far we've been using the default cdk deploy command that uses the default AWS CLI profile that you have configured. However, AWS CLI and AWS CDK both supports using multiple profiles and environments. This is useful when you have multiple AWS accounts and you want to deploy your CDK stacks to different accounts.

Environments

When we intantiate a stack in CDK, we can pass an env parameter that specifies the environment in which the stack will be deployed. This environment contains the AWS account and region where the stack will be deployed.

E.g., working off a new CDK app, we typically have the following code in the app.py file:

import aws_cdk as cdk

from cdk_app.my_stack import MyStack

app = cdk.App()
my_stack = MyStack(
    app,
    "MyStack",
) #👈🏽 No env define

app.synth()

In the above code, we are not specifying the environment in which the stack will be deployed. This means that the stack will be deployed to the default AWS CLI profile that you have configured.

To specify the environment, we can pass an env parameter to the MyStack constructor:

import aws_cdk as cdk

from cdk_app.my_stack import MyStack


env = {
    "account": "123456789012",
    "region": "us-east-1",
} #👈🏽 Define the environment


app = cdk.App()
my_stack = MyStack(
    app,
    "MyStack",
    env=env,
)

app.synth()

In the above code, we are specifying the environment in which the stack will be deployed. The env parameter is a dictionary that contains the account and region keys. The account key specifies the AWS account where the stack will be deployed, and the region key specifies the AWS region where the stack will be deployed.