Cloud infrastructure for MVPs: AWS CDK, Terraform, or 'just use the platform'
A practical take on infrastructure choices for early-stage products — when to reach for CDK, Terraform, or a managed platform like Vercel.
The 'right' infrastructure for an MVP is the one you can change quickly without breaking production. That's a lower bar than it sounds — and it rules out a surprising amount of what teams reach for by default.
Start with the platform, not the primitives
For most early-stage web products, a managed platform (Vercel, Cloudflare, Fly) plus a managed database is enough for the first year. You'll ship faster, sleep better, and defer real infrastructure decisions until you have real load and real requirements.
When to reach for AWS CDK
The moment you have background jobs, media processing, or a data pipeline that outgrows a serverless function, AWS starts to make sense. We reach for CDK (not raw CloudFormation, not SAM alone) because it lets us define infrastructure in the same TypeScript the app already uses, and code review it like any other change.
When Terraform is the right call
Multi-cloud, multi-account, or heavy reliance on non-AWS providers (Cloudflare, Datadog, third-party SaaS) tips the balance toward Terraform. It's the lingua franca of platform teams, and hiring is easier.
The trap to avoid
Building 'production-grade' infrastructure for a product that doesn't have production traffic yet. Multi-region, blue-green deploys, custom Kubernetes clusters — none of it matters until it does. Buy time with a platform, and reinvest that time in the product.