I maintain auster[1] and am a contributor to cfer[2] for exactly that purpose. ;) CloudFormation really isn't a rough time anymore, IMO.

[1] - https://github.com/eropple/auster

[2] - https://github.com/seanedwards/cfer

If you know those tools exist, maybe. I just put together a new project using cloudformation (technically serverless, but it turned into 90 percent cloudformation syntax anyways), and it was pretty rough.

Maybe it's just me, but as a programmer the first thing I ever asked when looking at the wall of CloudFormation JSON was "so how do we make this not suck?".

Our job is not just to automate servers, it's to automate processes, including stupid developer-facing ones.

True, but as a _programmer_, working on a _new to me platform or package_, I am _very_ reluctant to add an extra third-party abstraction layer which requires it's own evaluation of quality and stability and some learning curve. It's gotta be pretty clear to me that it really is "what everyone else is doing", or I've gotta get more experience with the underlying thing to be able to judge for myself better.

I've definitely been burned many times by adding an extra tool or layer meant to make things easier, that ends up not, for all manner of reasons. I think we all have.

Worth noting that "nearly 31,000 AWS CloudFormation stacks were created for Prime Day" [1], so Amazon uses CloudFormation heavily internally. Not a guarantee that it's what 'everyone else is doing', but it's a good indicator of quality/stability and that it will remain a core service within the AWS ecosystem for some time.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/prime-day-2017-powered-by-a...

I think they're talking about a CF template generator being the third-party software (I could be wrong).

You're not wrong. But in my case, that had been basically forbidden as an option, essentially because it "wasn't supported by Amazon," and because there's just additional risk to non-standard approaches. AWS certifications cover CloudFormation, so you can hire for that with low risk pretty easily. Other nonstandard utilities, not so much.

Cloudformation templates can be written in YAML now, which is a lot less sucky than writing JSON by hand.

If your only experience with CloudFormation is hand-written JSON, it's worth another look.

We used to use troposphere, a Python library for generating CloudFormation templates, but have since switched back to vanilla CloudFormation templates now that they added support for YAML. We're finding it's much nicer to read and write in plain YAML. We're also now using Sceptre for some advanced use cases (templatizing the templates, and fancier deployment automation).

> If your only experience with CloudFormation is hand-written JSON, it's worth another look.

Strongly agree.

YAML and sensible formatting conventions really do transform the usability of CloudFormation.