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Comment by jen20 | Hacker News Reader

Terraform gives a consistent _workflow_ across clouds, not a consistent codebase. I know personally of many teams using Terraform for significant multi-cloud deployments consisting of thousands of resources. Several switched from CloudFormation and saw their codebase size dramatically reduce.

Furthermore, the other comments on this post should disabuse you of the notion that there are "no corrupted state" problems with cloud formation: they happen all the time.

Disclosure: I worked on Terraform for quite some time at HashiCorp and am still a (community) maintainer of the AWS provider.

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Food for thought, but I've never had CloudFormation break because a patch level upgrade changed a regular expression to 1) disallow previously legal inputs, and 2) disallow inputs AWS allows. I've also never had it forget a resource (probably due to race conditions when deleting failed resources).

CFN has its warts, but I full-stop don't trust HashiCorp's operations or their attempt at a SDLC and I wouldn't trust my business's health to them as a company (and if the results of using it weren't enough, their clownshoes sales team's bad attempts to upsell would cinch it).

Totally agree. I don’t care how much less verbose terraform may be (this claim is questionable IMHO). The most important part of infrastructure engineering is being able to debug and fix things quickly by isolating issues to the smallest possible domain. The additional layer of highly unstable terraform source code does not decrease the debugging surface area.

Serious question: how do you go about debugging a CloudFormation stack that's in a broken state, without involving AWS support?

I mean, it's weird, because I agree with your statement that "The most important part of infrastructure engineering is being able to debug and fix things quickly by isolating issues to the smallest possible domain." And that's why I so strongly prefer Terraform, because I actually have control over the state file, how Terraform interacts with it, and I can move things in and out, and change things in-situ if necessary.

> I wouldn't trust my business's health to them as a company

That. It's most dangerous thing for long term projects - third party tools and services. You want to minimise that to absolutely necessary ones.

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