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Comment by gtsteve | Hacker News Reader

I understand the logic of not waiting for the CloudFormation team to do their work because it could introduce delays but it makes it a considerably less useful tool.

When considering Terraform vs CloudFormation I certainly took that into account and that's why I don't use CloudFormation for anything.

I wonder if there are any killer features of CloudFormation I missed when I looked into this (years ago now).

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You can now write your own resource providers [0], which seems similar to TF. It's pretty decent. The only issue is you can't easily migrate from a custom provider to an official one once they release it (without deleting and recreating the resource), which can be a dealbreaker.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/now-exten...

Not so much a killer feature, but I find that some actions in newer services are only possible to automate through Cloudformation (looking at you Workspaces), because of the time they take to open up the API.

For Workspaces it took them something like 2-3 years to release to the public API what you could do with Cloudformation

- AWS Business Support Plan

- The ability to configure everything about a lambda and export the template.

- Serverless Application Model tooling

- Quick Create Links - you can give out a link to developers that let them create infrastructure by using CF and just enter parameters. You can restrict them to only being able to create a stack that you specify.

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