[weiming]

There is also the AWS CDK (https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/) which is essentially lets you use your favorite language like Typescript or Python to generate CloudFormation, with an experience similar to Terraform. We've been experimenting with instead of TF, hoping it's here to stay.

[Normal_gaussian]

Take a look at pulumi; it provides a programmatic interface and related tooling on top of terraform.

[hardwaresofton]

Took the comment right out of my keyboard (?) -- these days whenever I talk about devops with people, I bring up pulumi. HCL and and almost all config-languages-but-really-DSLs are a death sentence.

I am very unlikely to pick terraform for any personal projects ever again, imagine being able to literally drop down to AWS SDK or CDK in the middle of a script and then go back to Pulumi land? AFAIK this is basically not possible with terraform (and terraform charges for API access via terraform cloud? or it's like a premium feature?)

[mcintyre1994]

I'm really liking CDK so far - it feels like Typescript which I'm using it with fits is really well. Things like being able to pass variables around (like which branch to deploy!) is really nice - makes some things that would be really horrible in plain CloudFormation really easy. I do worry a bit about TypeScript (or really any 'complete' programming language) for defining infrastructure though, I could easily see loads of ways to make it really hard and complex to follow. I wonder if an eslint plugin could help keep things on the right path.