[throwaway98121]

IMO using the web console for your cloud development sounds like your a tiny shop. Your infrastructure and all that configuration should be in code and version control.

I think CloudFormation is difficult to use and could be much easier, but ops rant about the AWS UI being unfriendly makes it sound like he’s not really the kind of customer AWS is really after.

[jacobsenscott]

We are a tiny shop and I use ansible whenever possible. Even managing two or three ec2 instances with the UI is a nightmare. IMO that's a feature - you should start with a cms when small. Not bolt it on when it is too late. I'm looking into terraform though. Ansible's aws support is fairly limited.

[toomuchtodo]

You will love Terraform. I highly recommend it over Cloudformation or any configuration management cloud-specific extensions.

[scarface74]

The reason that you should use CloudFormation is that if you are working for a business, they most likely have a business support agreement with AWS. If you ever come across an issue, you have an easy button - AWS’s excellent support.

[toomuchtodo]

I've found Hashicorp's support to be superior to paid AWS support. YMMV.

[scarface74]

I had an issue with a CF template caused by property not being the correct case and the error message made no sense.

I started a chat with AWS after giving them the ARN of the template. He looked through my CloudTrail logs and the documentation and couldn’t figure it out either. He said he would get back to me....

He created a simplified CF template that reproduced the problem, talked to an CF developer, he said the developer looked through the code of the API call that CF was attempting and they found that the property was case sensitive. The guys at Hashicorp couldnt do that.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Hashicorp fanboy when it comes to onpremise implementations. I developed a system around Consul, Nomad, and Vault with a helping of Fabio.