I've used both - with having to use CF to create a particularly gnarly and sprawling environment. I constantly ran into limitations hidden behind cryptic or unrelated error messages. It was infuriating.
Terraform syntax is definitely not sexy, but it's a robust piece of software, and in fact, can be used to learn better Go techniques.
A total aside, but people who claim Golang is easy are full of it. It's an extremely hard language to write well at scale, and Terraform is a good example to study.
Been using CF for a few years and haven't had much issues. Sure beats having to manually set up infra. The only thing that bothers me us running into the 200 resource stack limit like every 6 months.
your company sounds like they know what they are doing. Cloudformation will take your infrastructure from point A to point B or roll it back in case of failure. Terraform, not so much.
So much this. If you hate cloudformation, have a look at CDK, which allows you to programmatically define a stack in a language of your choice, instead of trying to use unreadable huge yaml to write code.
I really wish terraform will one day reach the same features and maturity as cloudformation.
to be fair to Terraform, this is hard. It's hard when you are dealing with multiple cloud providers since you have to keep state somewhere. Network failures or underlying cloud failures are gonna impair TF in the head every time.
If there is one thing TF needs to learn to do is handle failure. Right now it has that rosy yolo approach leaving you to pick up the pieces when it fails.
lol. Terraform cannot do basic things like rollback the deployment in case of failure. Also, I have yet to see CF losing track of its resources.
Here is a challenge for you: Deploy a moderate to complex infra with Terraform and after that try to clean up all the resources it created. 50$ says Terraform cannot do it and you need some sort of manual/script intervention. The future is bright.
CloudFormation is too limited. I imagine most companies use much more than AWS. Off the top of my head, we use Cloudflare, PagerDuty, GitLab, etc all of which have Terraform providers.
What happens when you have to use something outside of AWS? How do you codify those changes?
Merely as the technical answer to your question, not as advocacy: CFN has custom providers [0] and they've started publishing quite a few implementations on GH (but I haven't tried them to know if they're for real): e.g. https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-res...
As far as I know, it is possible to bridge terraform providers into a CFN stack using that mechanism, similar to how Pulumi works
