Comment by throwaway894345

I can't speak to Terraform because I haven't used it, but I'm skeptical that modules are sufficient for many of the same reasons that CloudFormation templates are insufficient. I think at some level you need the ability to programmatically generate arbitrary static configuration, and you end up needing something very like a real programming language to do that.

If you need something very like a real programming language, you should just use a real programming language instead of a tool that accidentally reinvents programming language concepts and the corresponding unnecessary learning curve that that implies for developers. I think the reason these tools are surviving in the "marketplace" is because they market is inexperienced and they conflate "generating static configs (to be passed into a tool that can apply the configs) with an imperative language" with "imperative provisioning of infrastructure". The market sees static/declarative solutions like Terraform and CloudFormation as the only alternatives to "imperative provisioning of infrastructure".

I think as our industry gets more experience and tools for generating YAML/static-configs improve, it will be clear that these are the ways forward.