[okr]

What is the alternative for programmatically start up a stack with a bunch of services?

[zokier]

Pulumi and Terraform are the two main contenders. Both are afaik bit different in their operating model

[bionsystem]

Although if one already uses ansible for configuring the VMs, ansible would probably be my first choice for deployment as well.

[okr]

Terraform can be done programatically? For example, i do start/stop a cloudformation for each $clientId, just as needed.

[earthling8118]

CDKTF is what you're looking for.