SST.dev wrote an article recently about how AWS CDK and Cloudformation is a black box and working with them is so frustrating.
https://sst.dev/blog/moving-away-from-cdk.html
There is slow, as-in something is noticeably slow. And then there is “CloudFormation slow”.
I agree with this so much. AWS CDK and CloudFormation is just over-engineered BS. Makes me question the whole point of using cloud infrastructure.
My understanding of Cloudformation is it predates all the other infra as code tools so it's just a legacy thing at this point, one Amazon will probably have a hard time switching away from. I never got too familiar with Terraform or the alternatives to form an opinion but I always thought they were using CFN underneath and it looks like that's not true:
Do any of the other cloud providers do this infra as code thing better, having learned from Amazon?
The provider model is fairly common. Some projects, like Pulumi (ew) even re-use terraform providers. Others, like Crossplane, have their own provider spec. A provider is basically an interface to a cloud provider API, so in theory it should be relatively easy to port one that’s already written for another tool.
I was impressed with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It has a full blown PowerShell module where one can fully automate any aspect desired. The other big plus is their free-forever service offering.