After all of the issues/PRs for cross-account CodePipelines are delivered (#3208, #3323 , #3387, #3388, #3389 ), we will have a great story for making it very easy to work with cross-account CodePipelines.

However, we also need to make it easy to work with cross-account CDK apps from the perspective of authentication from the command line. Most likely, this will involve a deeper integration with AWS profiles defined in the ~/.aws/credentials / ~/.aws/config files. A possible solution would be to allow passing profile when creating a Stack:

new Stack(app, 'Stack1', {
  env: {
     profile: 'account1',
  },
});

The ideal customer experience we want here is to be able to say:

$ cdk deploy '*'

, and all of the different credentials for the different accounts the Stacks belong to will be automatically wired together.