Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ldoughty | Hacker News Reader

I used to love Ansible/TF control of Infrastructure., But honestly, after 2 years of Ansible, we considered switching to TF, but ended up with SAM (an AWS deploy tool on top of cloud formation)

The only benefit I saw with Ansible/TF was controlling things outside AWS... Like running shell script, or connecting to servers.

Since we swapped to SAM, we no longer get breaking changes from minor patches... Features are available almost instantly, and we can easily modularize and deploy in parallel (we often do 30+ simultaneous deploys without issue).

I still don't claim TF out Ansible are useless, just that they are fixing a problem I don't have... I'm not multi-cloud.. and all the BS that was sold about these tools being easily transitioned from one cloud to another is junk. You can't just pick up lambda, change 3 lines, and it drops into azure.

> Features are available almost instantly

If SAM relies on Cloud Formation, there must have been some serious changes at AWS. CF was/is notoriously lagging behind AWS console and API in terms of feature coverage.

The Terraform AWS provider has always been much faster to reflect the AWS API changes.

Not especially true for all AWS Services, there has been some services that were only available on CF (Workspaces comes to mind).

But in this case it wasn't Hashicorp fault, as what was available in CF wasn't in the AWS official API.

It took something like a year for AWS to release the API

In agreement with you, SAM's support in CF and CDK is solid. AWS really put all their ducks behind SAM.

The place that suffers is ElasticBeanstalk. I used to be on EB but couldn't take it anymore. I kept having to run mini-templates from inside the beanstalk machines to get access to specific items that weren't exposed to CF directly.

Once I moved to ECS/Fargate, it's worlds better support. ECS still has some parts that are laggy in the CDK (and you can still do it via JSON obj) but not in CF. It's been pretty good here in Fargate land.

If I recall correctly, a couple years ago aws switched from one central team owning all of the cfn implementations to pushing it onto the service owner, so it’s no longer bottlenecked on a single teams queue. Given that the serverless teams are all invested in sam, it follows they’d make sure the things are implemented

You might want to check it the Serverless Framework [0], the inspiration for SAM, which adds variables and a lot of flexibility.

[0] https://www.serverless.com

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