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by tokamak 1486 days ago
AWS should really find a way to replace CF with something sane like TF so we can have both cloud resources and cloud workload described with native and managed tech. TF is pain but necessary.
2 comments

I think your perception might be due to using TF. To me, once CF added YAML support it's much more straight forward to use.
Use the Serverless framework for your cFT (no serverless needed) to add in richer variables (e.g. config find fetching) capability too.
Have you checked out CDK or Pulumi? CDK still has a few warts but overall I've been pretty happy with it. Haven't used Pulumi but from chatting with friends it sounds like it has a similar feel as CDK but supports multi-cloud like Terraform.
Cdk is compiling into CF template.

And Pulumi is using Terraform providers under the hood.

Writing infra in imperative style can cause ALOT of unseen issues when developers start adding IFology or Design Patterns..

Pulumi also has a newer iteration that uses provider APIs directly. A pain point has been that terraform provides tend to lag significantly with platform APIs, or just miss some functionality entirely.
The providers are maintained by dedicated teams of Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Hashicorp themselves, other big corps.

Pulumi abstractions are updated by a single corpo team.

Ill be EXTREMELY surprised if they wont laaaggg alot more behind when they start supporting more and more platforms.

Its simply a matter of amount of ppl working on the tool.

Agreed in principle. In this instance they have basically rigged up a machine to poll and parse the GCP API Discovery service into a native provider. https://developers.google.com/discovery/v1/using

It’s promise is sustainably same-day parity with platform APIs. It is generated code, so it may not be semantically pleasing, but it should just work. I haven’t spent much time with it to form a nuanced opinion but I do think it’s a novel and reasonable approach.

https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumiup-google-native-provider/

Pulumi can use TF providers but in general has custom providers, as I understand it - generally you would not be using the TF provider for most deployments.
Most CDK code is absolutely declarative. Unlike TF, you have an actual programming language as a escape hatch.
Pulumi is TF alternative but it is not managed like CF. CDK uses CF underneath with all its issues.