Strongly agree. Support for new AWS features hits Terraform much faster than CloudFormation (still waiting for CF support for AWS's managed ElasticSearch service that was unveiled two months ago--Terraform got it right away). Some of the critiques below are true... HCL is fine, but Terraform's interpolation syntax has a long way to go. That said, CF's JSON is way more painful to deal with. As for the other problems, they go back mainly to someone using a tool they don't fully understand. Yes you can get into some odd states in rare cases, but Terraform gives you the ability to rapidly build and tear down your infrastructure over and over if necessary to work out details and you have fine-grained control over which pieces are built how. Not only that but you can inspect the logs to see what's happening and if there are bugs, you can fix them yourself because the tool is open source and free. CloudFormation gives zero visibility, no fine-grained control, and it's completely opaque and where it's broken, you can't fix it.
Terraform is relatively new and improving rapidly. It has its problems, but it's light-years beyond CloudFormation. It's clear that Amazon doesn't place a high priority on making CloudFormation easy to use, or to support new features. The right approach to any problems with Terraform is not to spread FUD about it like below, but to contribute code fixes.
Terraform is relatively new and improving rapidly. It has its problems, but it's light-years beyond CloudFormation. It's clear that Amazon doesn't place a high priority on making CloudFormation easy to use, or to support new features. The right approach to any problems with Terraform is not to spread FUD about it like below, but to contribute code fixes.