AWS Cloudformation Which is Better? Terraform does have advantages over CloudFormation.

Hi Wycliffe,

Adoption of IaC tooling depend on many factors. One of the most important to me is how your organization is structured and who is gonna provision the infra.

If software engineers are going to be responsible, maybe CDK is more suitable.

I have been using terraform, and true, you can use modules to reuse components, but project structure has some limitations as you cannot produce Stacks, is hard to structure code as folders and you may need to rely on third parties (terragrunt) to overcome some limit.

Of course CloudFormation is another option, but it becomes super verbose and learning curve is slightly higher.

Depending on your choice you can look at AWS workshops for cdk https://cdkworkshop.com/20-typescript.html or certifications https://www.hashicorp.com/certification/terraform-associate

Hope it helps ;)

+1 with @alatech's answers.

There are many considerations when choosing tooling of any type. For Infrastructure as Code tooling, you would consider your/teams current skillset, if you have any existing assets you want to reuse, personal preference, etc.

Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an open-source project created and maintained by AWS, and is targeted at folks who write software in .Net, Java, Go, Python, Node/TypeScript. CDK provides you the ability to declare your infrastructure using the programming language that you already know (if supported*). CDK will synthesize Cloud Assembly files which will be processed by AWS CloudFormation.

CDK does have a module reuse, we call them Constructs. There are Level 1, 2, and 3 constructs for CDK.

Terraform is an open source project created and maintained by APN Partner Hashicorp. It has it's own language (HCL), and allows you to create you infrastructure using declarative blocks of resources. Terraform operates directly against the AWS Public APIs.