I don’t see how you couldn’t learn both. Terraform is dead simple to learn and cloud formation is the best way to define your infrastructure in code in AWS. Even more wrapped by CDK. I don’t think you would go that far career wise knowing only with Terraform for IaC.
I also don’t understand those organisations that use every single AWS managed solution (RDS, Redis, Elasticsearch, EKS) but then they feel the need to manage their infrastructure state themselves with Terraform instead of choosing the managed solution for this.
Re:Terraform vs. AWS CloudFormation
by kenerwin88 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @07:48PM
(#28779939)
As a former AWS employee, Terraform is MUCH better at scale for AWS resources than Cloudformation or even AWS CDK. CDKs reliance on CloudFormation underneath means being limited to the exact same problems that are mentioned in the article, as well as managing resources at enormous scale incredibly painful.
Often, these single-vendor technologies are thin syntactic and nomenclaturial veneers over actually-quite-general abstractions. E.g. it's very easy, if you want or if you need, to rewrite a CloudFormation stack as a Terraform project, or a even a set of Kubernetes custom-resource-controller resource manifests. They're all analogous technologies; the and the "hard part" of an implementation in any of them isn't to do with the things that make them different, but rather the things they share in common — the formal modelling of a digraph of dependent declarative infrastructure resources.
I get that CloudFormation may be a bit better than Terraform in this way or that way. But I have no personal interest in learning it. All that investment of time and effort and when I need to do a project on a different vendor I have nothing, no skills. What's the point?
To be clear: I understand why companies and even specific teams or projects may choose to go all in on vendor-lock-in. It's often the most direct line to the business value they want and as people point out, it's rare to never that most cloud native applications will shift cloud vendors, and even if they do most of a Terraform setup will have to be reworked.
So I get why companies and managers want that. I just don't understand why software engineers in those teams are so happy to go along.