[aussiedude]

You can also use Ansible with Jinja2 templating to generate your Cloudformation templates.

Describe loops and other properties in Ansible and have it build out a complex Cloudformation template for it to deploy. Use an Ansible variable for your stack name so you update/delete an existing stack and your good to go. Could even break it down to environments so dev = smaller instances vs stage/prod etc.

[anothernewdude]

That just shifts where the state is being stored. Once you use cloudformation, it's being stored on S3, which you can do with terraform anyway.

[takeda]

Wouldn't using troposphere[1] be easier?

[1] https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere