[thayne]

I really like the idea of using a "real" programming language for this sort of thing. That's one reason why I prefer chef to Ansible.

That said, using the AWS sdk directly is probably fine for creating resources, or tearing them down, but if you need to modify something, you'll need to have some mechanism to find the difference between the current state and the expected state, and that can get complicated fast, and is something that terraform takes care of for you.

CDK basically let's you generate cloudformation (or terraform) from other languages

Pulumi might be worth you looking into, but it still has some rough edges, and imo isn't as mature and reliable as terraform.