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Comment by rantwasp | Hacker News Reader

yeah no.

cloudformation is awesome and it works as advertised. I have literally not seen it fail catastrophically ever since it came out. it just works.

terraform? or terrafail as it’s known. it’s a disaster. it cannot keep track of the resources it creates. when in trouble, it throws its hands up in the air and you’re on your own. do yourself a favor and don’t learn the hard way - in production - that terraform cannot take your infra from point A to point B (and rollback in case something went wrong).

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Lol, cloudformartion historically did't support really huge and mandatory parts of aws resources and resource parameters and as there was no Roadmap of support until previous year https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-cov... it was not fan because basically you couldn't even try for example to enable RDS storage autoscaller for RDS via CF template. That's why terraform was created because of AWS CF didn't support own AWS resources.

hahahah. terraform has bugs that were opened 8 years ago and were swept under the rug countless times.

the fundamental problem is that terraform is not even a half baked tool (what version was it again? 0.12?) and people are betting the farm on it. guess i’ll go build more software while others are twirling their hands with the super HCL language (what’s even more aggravating is that Hashicorp got this part - the language - right with Vagrant but I guess reinventing the wheel and using go was sexier).

Just because it isn’t 1.0 doesn’t mean it’s not production ready.

Yeah I never got the CloudFormt1ion hate. I write them for a living without any issue.

it’s not cool to use it. why use a service that’s written, ran and maintained by a dedicated team that also builds all the other services you use? (if in AWS). they don’t know what they’re doing, right?

better use some randotool and talk big about Iaac when in reality the only people that I have ran across and loved Terraform either 1) used it on a really small scale or 2) don’t really have a lot of experience with the cloud.

the only reason to not use Cloudformation is that you’re not using AWs. Use whatever your cloud provides.

For everyone that has objections, an appeal to authority: I was building stuff on the cloud before you knew the cloud was a thing. I worked with AWS, GCP, Azure and [sad face] OpenStack extensively.

If you needed to setup an S3 bucket that triggers a Lambda function when an object is added, how would you do that? Last I looked, the S3 resource would get created lazily, the Lambda wouldn't get an S3 ARN, as the S3 bucket didn't exist yet and the stack would fail.

It's a super obvious way to use S3 and Lambda, but the docs recommend something insane.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/cloud...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38752985/create-a-lambda...

Terraform resources aren't meant to be externally modified. The fonciguration itself shouldn't have a life of it's own. It should represent the whole behavior of the stack

this is not about terraform “resources”. it’s about having a reliable way to work with your infrastructure. terraform is not that way (have you ever tried seeing what happens if the terraform process crashes/is killed or you lose network connectivity while terraforming?)

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