[yowlingcat]

While I'm not sure I find the fractal metaphor clarifying (fractals are absolute _last_ kinds of structures I want to see anywhere near my infrastructure definitions), I do sympathize with the "false advertising" of infrastructure-as-code when it's merely checked in. As the age old saying goes, programming in XML (or JSON, or ...) is hell when you really want to reach for a proper programming language.

This is part of the issue with CloudFormation. I've seen monstrosities like an entire lambda function source code definition written into a plaintext key in a YAML file, and worse yet, seen this described as normal. Yes. Normal in hell is what it is.

So with all of this said, I think developments like the AWS CDK are very cool. CDK takes the approach of a high level SDK over programming in YAML or anything like it. I like it a lot. It's higher level than something like `boto` which is just raw function calls, but not so high level that you're trying to write deployment logic in YAML. You get a nice in between which is written to behave in whatever language you use it in. I believe this approach was spearheaded by AWS internally after seeing how CFN become something widely considered a failure.

[tinodelletna]

The Fractal metaphor is intended to be seen in the light of their self-similar property. It is the idea of having micro-structures of standardised infrastructure components that could be replicated indefinitely through the invocation of interface operations within a macro-structure (the blueprint).

About the AWS CDK I completely agree, we refer to CloudFormation in the article as that is ultimately the "output" of CDK, but we definitely agree that is a really good step in the right direction for IaC tooling. We "just" need someting portable across clouds now :)

[sleepybrett]

I think thats what pulumi wants to be, but their pricing puts me off.

[shaicoleman]

There's a fully functional open source version