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Agreed about CF. AWS puts a huge emphasis on CloudFormation when they know it is sub-par. Ansible is pretty cool too because you can easily convert between YAML/JSON for CF, and add a lot of flexibility based on variables and other things such as error handling that you can't do with Terraform.

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I don't agree it is subpar. I have a fairly long list of reasons for preferring CF over Terraform. I agree on combining CF with Ansible though. My recipe is to wrap a CF template in an Ansible role. It makes for a versioned chunk of automation that composes well with my other roles, including ones that are not CF based. Plus I can do non-CF setup tasks using any Ansible module, and even run tests, to get pretty much full end-to-end automation for a given stack. I haven't found a way to get the same degree of power and flexibility from Terraform without resorting to writing custom plugins.

Definitely not subpar. Cloudformation is an incredible service. I’ve used it to deploy thousands of stacks. It just works.

does it rollback in the face of failure? /s

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...

i know, hence the /s

it was a jab at Terraform’s behavior

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