[androidbishop]

Terraform, and by extension HCL, is more powerful and flexible. It can be used across clouds. It has providers for all kinds of things, like kubernetes. It can be abstracted and modularized. It supports cool features like workspaces and junk, depending on how you want to use it.

Also recently I was forced to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager scripts for some legacy project we were migrating to Terraform, and I was shocked at how buggy and useless it was. Failed to create resources for no discernible reason, couldn't update existing resources with dependencies, couldn't delete resources, was just unfathomably shit all around. Finished the Terraform migration earlier this morning and everything went off without a hitch, plus we got more coverage for stuff Deployment Manager doesn't support. It's also organized much nicer now, with versioned modules and what-have-you.

Cloudformation is ugly and again, surprisingly isn't well supported by AWS. I don't understand how it's possible, but terraform providers seem to be more up to date with products and APIs. Maybe that's just me but I've seen others complain about the same thing.

[wodenokoto]

Isn’t google cloud deployment just bash calls to the google cloud cli disguised as declarations by way of yaml?

[androidbishop]

Considering the fact that you can inject python code blocks, I kind of doubt it. It also makes API calls that populates a dashboard with an inventory of resources created, so it seems to be more of an api wrapper like other IaC solutions.