31. CloudFormation or Terraform?

Should I use CloudFormation or should I use Terraform instead? If you are just starting to write Infrastructure as Code (IaaC) you probably have this question. In this episode, we will discuss in detail how these two amazing pieces of technology compare against each other and what their features, weaknesses and strengths are. We will share our opinions based on our experience with these 2 technologies and guess what, for once we have a bit of clash of opinions! Can you guess who is in the Terraform camp and who is in the CloudFormation camp instead?

00:00 Intro
00:45 What Terraform and CloudFormation are used for
01:55 Terraform overview
06:53 CloudFormation overview
13:58 Differences between Terraform and CloudFormation
16:08 Extensibility in Terraform
18:40 Extensibility in CloudFormation
21:30 Multi-account & multi-organisation deployments
24:24 When to pick CloudFormation
25:32 The case for Terraform
28:00 Other IaaC tools
29:13 Outro

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:
A tutorial on how to create resources conditionally with CDK (and CloudFormation): https://loige.co/create-resources-con...
An article to understand in depth how to use secrets management with SSM and SecretsManager together with CloudFormation: https://dev.to/eoinsha/3-ways-to-read...
Ben Kehoe’s tweet about switching from CloudFormation to Terraform:   / 1158758917515763712  
Terraform null resources: https://registry.terraform.io/provide...
CloudFormation Macros: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudF...
How to workaround missing CloudFormation features (by Cloudonaut): https://cloudonaut.io/three-and-a-hal...
Org-formation: https://github.com/org-formation/org-...
How to create accounts in an org with Terraform: https://registry.terraform.io/provide...
Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform: https://learn.hashicorp.com/tutorials...
Pulumi: https://www.pulumi.com/
Cloudonaut’s comparison of CloudFormation with Terraform: https://cloudonaut.io/cloudformation-...
Cloudonaut’s free CloudFormation templates: https://templates.cloudonaut.io/en/st...

You can listen to AWS Bites wherever you get your podcasts:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Lh7Pzq...
Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0...
Breaker: https://www.breaker.audio/aws-bites
RSS: ​​https://anchor.fm/s/6a3312a0/podcast/rss

Do you have any AWS questions you would like us to address?
Leave a comment here or connect with us on Twitter:
  / eoins  
  / loige  

#aws #terraform #cloudformation