Terraform vs. AWS CloudFormation
The problem with both is that you quickly accumulate weeks&#x2F;months of accumulated coding time that costs a pretty penny at market freelance rates. Spending a few hundred K on devops is routine for a lot of companies.<p>My main issue with this is that a lot of that coding is just reinventing the same wheels over and over again. Jumping through many hoops along the way like a trained poodle.<p>It&#x27;s stupid. Why is this so hard &amp; tedious. I&#x27;ve seen enough infrastructure as code projects over the last fifteen years to know that actually very little has changed in terms of the type of thing people build with these tools. There&#x27;s always a vpc with a bunch of subnets for the different AZs. Inside those go vms that run whatever (typically dockerized these days) with a load balancer in front of it and some cruft on the side for managed services like databases, queues, etc. The LB needs a certificate. I&#x27;ve seen some minor variations of this setup but it basically boils down to that plus maybe some misc cruft in the form of lambdas, buckets, etc.<p>So why is it so hard to get all of that orchestrated? Why do we have to boil the oceans to get some sane defaults for all of this. Why do we need to micromanage absolutely everything here? Monitoring, health checks, logging systems, backups, security &amp; permissions. All of this needs to be micromanaged. All of it is disaster waiting to happen if you get it wrong. All of it is bespoke cruft that every project is reinventing from scratch.<p>All I want is &quot;hey AWS, Google, MS, ... go run this thing over there and tell me when its done. This is the domain it needs to run over. It&#x27;s a bog standard web server expecting to serve traffic via http&#x2F;websockets. Give me something with sane defaults. Not a disassembled jig saw puzzle with thousands of pieces. This stuff should not be this hard in 2021.