What you'll need

Every concept's last step takes your work out of the sandbox — you clone the finished template and run cdk deploy against your own AWS account. Here's the one-time local setup, and what your account needs.

Local tools

• Node.js 20+ and npm — runs the CDK toolchain. Verify with node --version.
• AWS CLI v2, configured — CDK uses it for your credentials and region. Install it, then run aws configure. Verify with aws --version.
• Git — to clone the template (or download it as a ZIP if you'd rather skip Git).
• AWS CDK — nothing to install separately for TypeScript: the template pins the CDK version and runs it through npx cdk, so npm install handles it.
• Python 3.x and venv — for the Python track only. Create a virtual environment with python3 -m venv .venv, activate it, then pip install -r requirements.txt (the template's own README has the exact steps). Verify with python3 --version.

Your AWS account

• Credentials configured — an IAM user or SSO profile via aws configure.
• Permission to create the stack — CloudFormation, S3, plus IAM and Lambda (file upload and cleanup in some templates run as a small Lambda-backed custom resource). An admin or PowerUser role is fine for learning; production uses least privilege.
• Region bootstrapped once — npx cdk bootstrap sets up the assets CDK needs. One command, once per account and region.

What it costs

Real AWS usage on your own account has a real, usually small, cost. Each deploy lesson in the app shows a concrete cost estimate for what you're about to create, with the real drivers behind it — check the lesson itself for the number before you deploy.