[golovast]

At lot of the debate here centers on DSLs vs programming languages and I don't want to get into the weeds of that. I did use terraform extensively at a few places and generally if you want to do something simple it does a fine job. When things start getting complex and the team & infrastructure is larger...well, let's just say some warts start coming up. You more or less end up with some type of a wrapper around it.

But in another place we decided to use troposphere[0] and I liked it more (at least for AWS-only shops). A lot more flexibility and you're relying on Cloudformation to do some of the heavy lifting around states. We basically ended up with a tool based on that library which would generate deployable CF stacks (and some other things).

[0] https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere