[jen20]

> more reliable

This is... quite the assertion. Terraform has historically been _far_ more reliable than CloudFormation, and perfectly capable of getting itself into unrecoverable states. Furthermore, the behaviour has _never_ been predictable - CF only even grew the ability to preview changes relatively recently.

(Disclaimer: I worked on Terraform at HashiCorp, and on other provisioning tools since).

[nikolay]

For a person who uses Terraform daily, I won't agree with you. So many times I had to manually alter state files, and often contribute to basic providers, and wait months to get PRs merged in. It used to be that CloudFormation lagged behind Terraform for AWS, but not anymore. Now, it's quite the opposite and you see people using CloudFormation resource within Terraform as they are stuck into using plain Terraform and yet don't want to manage resource manually.

[jen20]

You won’t find argument from me that HashiCorp have let maintenance slide, but there is still no conceivable way that CFN is more reliable in the general case.

[nikolay]

Hmmm, just searched GitHub for aws_cloudformation_stack and found 375 public repositories. I'm sure those references are orders of magnitude more in the private repos. In other words, you still need CloudFormation with Terraform on AWS... so, why use the patchwork then?