| I think it's a difference in prioritization and how CloudFormation is treated as a separate product as opposed to a fundamental part of releasing features. The other two major cloud providers treat templates as a core part of the release process (now). As I understand it, the three cloud providers differ in this way: 1. Microsoft Azure releases template/API first - no features can be released unless an Azure Resource Manager template can access it. I think they use ARM templates for their integration testing, as well, but I'm not sure. (If you're an Azure 'softie, please chime in!). 2. Google Cloud Platform releases APIs first - no features are released without extensively being tested via API integrations. They do have a CloudFormation/Azure RM template offering now called Deployment Manager so that my change. (This means that Terraform-like tools can target features quickly, and I have no experience with Deployment Manager but I suspect it does as well.) 3. Amazon AWS releases to the web console first. You might say, "Whoa, what about Bezos' service oriented architecture email?"[1] As far as I know, that's true for internal features. But all user features are exposed through the web console, then wrappers around those APIs are exposed, then, sometimes years later, CloudFormation gains the ability to target those APIs. For this reason, I trust Microsoft and Google Cloud a lot more to maintain parity between what I can do in Terraform/Pulumi/native template tools and in their web consoles. [1] - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611, per Bezos: "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces." |