How I use the good parts of AWS
I am in agreement with everything generally except for CloudFormation and setting up Route53 zones manually.<p>I use Terraform to setup my infrastructure as service on AWS, including Route53 zones.<p>After the latest 0.12 upgrade to the language, Terraform is quite a bit more user friendly than CloudFormation, and importantly, not locked down to just Amazon -- it supports multiple clouds and on-premises solutions for declarative orchestration of resources.