YAML is a step forward, but I wish that Amazon would give up on CloudFormation. It seems like it isn't a templating system so much as a bad programming language in the making.
I agree that it leaves much to be desired. What do you recommend instead?
Pick your favorite programming language (or say ansible if u really love more yaml, or ...).
Except that you can't do what CloudFormation does with just a programming languages alone or with Ansible.
Simplified substitutions alone are a much needed upgrade. Writing Fn::joins everywhere was not only error prone, but also time consuming and confusing.
Very excited to play with these new updates. They were much needed! It'll be nice to get rid of the duplicated logic between stacks. Also, comments!
Do you use it? I've always been hesitant to add another layer of abstraction, as AWS already takes forever to push updates into CloudFormation.
Yeah, I use Terraform and like it quite a bit. Terraform tends to be quite responsive to changes in AWS land and `terraform plan` is incredibly useful. It's saved me from blowing away instances a few times.