Level up CloudFormation with VS Code

https://dannys.space/level-up-cloudformation-with-vs-code

by dsteenman • 6 years ago

26 13 6 years ago

dannys.space

booi• 6 years ago

Most of the time when I see more complication on top of cloudformation, what you really want is terraform.

strangelove026• 6 years ago

My preferred tool.

A few of the biggest selling points (for me):

- It feels like writing code instead of writing yaml.

- To the above you can define your own parameter object types in Terraform. To create a list parameter in cloudformation requires `CommaDelimitedList` which can only contain strings.

- To the above two points, your Terraform stacks can be DRY'd up a bit which makes them easier to read than a massive 1000 line cloudformation file.

- Terraform is run completely in your console which is faster and improves the developer experience.

- Resources are never "conditionally" replaced. They either are or are not. Don't know if this is still a thing in Cloudformation land but the resources change diff Terraform gives you is completely clear.

That all said I don't mind writing Cloudformation, but (again in my opinion) Terraform is vastly more powerful.

tracer4201• 6 years ago

I’ll try it out. I’ve been writing CloudFormation and using SAM templates for some recent projects involving Lambda. Defining my general resources is easy enough but having to define through IAM roles and policies turns into a real pain super quick.

dsteenman5• 6 years ago

That’s an option for sure! For more complicated projects my preference goes to CDK. But for smaller projects CloudFormation is fine enough, especially if you use the extensions I described in the article.

mxz3000• 6 years ago

Cdk is the way to go for pretty much anything. It's so much faster to develop an infrastructure in cdk than it is in cloudformation it's insane

querulous• 6 years ago

i find cfn has a higher barrier to entry and is more verbose for small projects but scales much better than terraform (which breaks down entirely once you need to manage thousands of resources across more than handful of providers)

(yes i've tried terragrunt, it's not an answer)

dsteenman5• 6 years ago

Or if you have to manage 100s of accounts stacksets can be really helpful as well.

MattHodge• 6 years ago

Here are some additional things you can do: https://hodgkins.io/up-your-cloudformation-game-with-vscode

dsteenman5• 6 years ago

Your post definitely contains some good tips! Thanks for sharing!

markl42• 6 years ago

Shameless plug opportunity! On the topic of "more complication on top of cloudformation", I made a tool that lets you split up cloudformation files with import syntax.

https://github.com/magicmark/cf-merge

Level up CloudFormation with VS Code

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