[nicobn]

Don't get me wrong, I love AWS. I use ~15 products almost everyday. I actually like how powerful IAM is.

But yeah, CloudFormation just sucks. It does. It's painful because it's a really good idea but the configuration format is inadequate for the task.

CF should have been implemented using a declarative DSL similar to Puppet from the start. I've been tinkering with the idea of creating a DSL with a JSON translation layer but I always assumed AWS would eventually move away from JSON anyway, making the effort futile. Four years later and still no improvements. Definitely my biggest disappointment with their platform.

[010a]

Am I insane, or are you and the commentators below unknowingly describing Terraform?

https://www.terraform.io/

[DigitalJack]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought cloudformation was difficult.

Terraform is great so far. I am running into some duct-tape issues with resources shared between two terraformations, though.

[nicobn]

You're not insane!

[eropple]

Plenty of those DSLs already exist, the cfer project[1] that I contribute to and SparkleFormation being two I can vouch for. I don't find CloudFormation particularly annoying or difficult, and certainly better than the alternatives (BOSH/Terraform/etc.), given such a wrapper, and cfn-init with CloudFormation metadata is miles ahead of "well, install Consul and connect to the cluster and eventually reach the state you want to be in" for my uses.

[1] - https://github.com/seanedwards/cfer

[2] - https://github.com/sparkleformation/sparkle_formation

[jonaf]

I maintain a ruby dsl as well at http://github.com/bazaarvoice/cloudformation-ruby-dsl

The format is a weak argument against cloud formation. It has some negatives. This one is easily overcome.

[ivarrian]

And I salute you! We heavily use the Ruby DSL.

[user5994461]

As already said, you should use terraform which has its own DSL (called HCL). Inspired by JSON but way simpler and more appropriate for this specific task.

Important tip: If you use one of jetbrains IDE (IntelliJ/PyCharm/...) there is a free plugin to handle terraform files.

It gives the usual syntax highlighting + auto completion of variables and devices + detection of errors. It's very very nice!

[justicezyx]

I have to state that configuration is not easy. CF might suck, but imagine something easily to replace it and works better is close to be wishful thinking.

[yclept]

Terraform