The CDK has made managing IAM so much easier for applications. It’s one of the main reasons we moved from Terraform to CDK.

We did the opposite because there was so much obfuscation about what exactly CDK was doing behind the curtains with respect to "small" things like IAM. We needed to know exactly which role was created or modified, etc, and we just couldn't get that with the basic interfaces that CDK provided. Writing those roles, users, groups, policies, attachments out explicitly into their own resource statements made things so much more clear, especially with respect to the relationships to other resources, and less risky