Yeah so tf and cloudformation are kind of the big options in the aws space. They’re both good tools. But I like tf over cf because I have additional control.
The import functionality is super useful in real life, as is “state hacking”. Yeah so technically it’s an antipattern but when you are down and dirty cloud engineering it is very useful to be able to edit the tf state (by comparison you have no access to the internals of cf) to avoid destroying/migrating databases or other precious resources where it turns out you judged the proper point of ownership wrong. This is not really the reason one is “supposed” to like one tool over another but there it is.
Refactoring infrastructure as code is kind of a dark art, and IMHO tf has a way better story for that. SUPER hard to sell though because the problems are not obvious at all. The main reason is that it exposes state as a first-class concept and although big chunks of that are presented as “internals you should not mess around with” it is a pretty big win in terms of day-to-day engineering (and of course usually you shouldn’t...).
What I do wish is that HashiCorp would finally make using third party providers suck less. They seem super sold on a “registry” and bunch of stuff which solves HC level problems while I would be happy with a URL and a trust relationship...
Yeah so tf and cloudformation are kind of the big options in the aws space. They’re both good tools. But I like tf over cf because I have additional control.
I love Consul+Nomad for job scheduling for on prem deployments. Especially since you can use regular executables and not just Docker containers.
But for AWS, it’s CloudFormation all of the way. Not necessarily because it’s better, but if something weird happens that I can’t figure out, I have an easy button - the business support level of AWS.
The import functionality is super useful in real life, as is “state hacking”. Yeah so technically it’s an antipattern but when you are down and dirty cloud engineering it is very useful to be able to edit the tf state (by comparison you have no access to the internals of cf) to avoid destroying/migrating databases or other precious resources where it turns out you judged the proper point of ownership wrong. This is not really the reason one is “supposed” to like one tool over another but there it is.
Refactoring infrastructure as code is kind of a dark art, and IMHO tf has a way better story for that. SUPER hard to sell though because the problems are not obvious at all. The main reason is that it exposes state as a first-class concept and although big chunks of that are presented as “internals you should not mess around with” it is a pretty big win in terms of day-to-day engineering (and of course usually you shouldn’t...).
What I do wish is that HashiCorp would finally make using third party providers suck less. They seem super sold on a “registry” and bunch of stuff which solves HC level problems while I would be happy with a URL and a trust relationship...