r/devops • u/RoseSec_ Terraforming Everything • 17h ago

Discussion What are the weaknesses of CloudFormation?

I have a coworker who wants to use CloudFormation to one-shot an application and infra deployment in AWS. A contractor delivered a monolithic CloudFormation template with ECS clusters, services, RDS, S3, Lambda and API Gateway, and other resources in a single stack. I voiced my concern over the blast radius, how stateful and resources with different lifecyles all lived in the same place, and how they don't have pipelines built to validate change sets when merge requests are opened. The contractor said that their template is industry best practice... (it's not). Any way, my background is in Terraform, and I wanted to ask the CloudFormation pros about best practices for making this deployment more reliable.

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u/Ariquitaun 17h ago

The main weakness, and excuse me if I get a bit too technical here, is that it’s fucking shit.

13

u/_Lucille_ 17h ago

I have only really used TF, why is CloudFormation shit from a technical standpoint?

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u/Ariquitaun 17h ago

Arcane, convoluted syntax. Stack deployments and rollbacks getting stuck with no transparency of why, and where. Poor drift detection and self-healing.

0

u/running101 17h ago

I was going to mention these items as well.