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by eropple 3122 days ago
Terraform requires significant infrastructure to get the same state management and implicit on-device access that CloudFormation's metadata service does. A common pattern in systems I oversee or consult on is to use CloudFormation's metadata service (which is not the EC2 metadata service, to be clear) to feed Ansible facts or chef-zero attributes in order to have bootstrapped systems that do not rely upon having a Tower or Chef Server in my environment.

The Terraform domain spec is not sufficiently expressive (just look at the circumlocutions you need to not create something in one environment versus another). It's way too hard to build large modules, but the lack of decent scoping makes assembling many small modules difficult too. Worse, the domain spec is also requires HCL, which is awful, or JSON, which is a return to the same problem that cfer solves for CloudFormation. One of my first attempts at a nontrivial open-source project was Terraframe[1], a Ruby DSL for Terraform; I abandoned it out of frustration when it became evident that Terraform's JSON parsing was untested, broken, and unusable in practice. Out of that frustration grew my own early CloudFormation prototypes, which my friend Sean did better with cfer.

If you're looking for an alternative to CloudFormation, I generally recommend BOSH[2], as it solves problems without introducing new ones. Saying the same for Terraform is a stretch.

[1] - https://github.com/eropple/terraframe

[2] - https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh
1 comments
Rapzid 3121 days ago
Cloudformation is not without its problems, even still. I feel you overstate Terraform's issues, though there is tons of valid criticism to go around. I would say Terraform really shines in areas CF still does not.

We use Terraform for our foundation and a clever Cloudformation custom resource hack to export values out to use in Cloudformation stacks where appropriate(use with Serverless services, etc). Works great for us; Terraform has seen significant(surprising even if you haven't looked at it in 6+ months) development over the past year.

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