Recently there have been discussions about the advantages and disadvantegs of using Hashicorp’s Terraform vs AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure as code on AWS. While these products change continuously, here’s a snapshot summarization of the advantages of each system.

AWS Cloudformation

• Tighter integration with AWS Services: In my opinion, this is the biggest draw to using CloudFormation. You simply can’t use Terraform for things like AWS Service Catalog. Service Catalog in particular is a huge benefit to acheiving agility with control, and to avoid using it simply because your processes are Terraform-based would be a shame.
• IAM-based access control: This is another example of the integration story, but if you’re already heavily invested in AWS it’s nice to not have to learn a different access control mechanism.
• Has a GUI: If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s nice to not be forced to use the command line.
• Feature support: For new services and features, AWS CloudFormation generally has support prior to Terraform. While there are exceptions to this, fundamentally CloudFormation has an edge as the service is inside AWS and thus has advance notice of all new services and features. Often CloudFormation support is included with the launch of a new service or feature. At the time of this writing, IPv6 VPC support is in CloudFormation but Terraform does not yet support it.

Terraform

• count=n and pre-built functions: CloudFormation has some functions, but Terraform goes further, and count=n is simply fantastic.
• Inspect current state: In many cases you shouldn’t need to guess about your current environment, but if you’re mixing and matching various templates or you’re the type of organization that occassionally breaks the rules and allows some manual configuration, the ability to define a template that can dynamically compensate for differences in the environment is pretty powerful.
• Multiple account support: You might be able to do this in CloudFormation, but it’s complicated and a bit hackish.
• Multiple region support: See above

Mythical Advantage of Terraform

One advantage I hear about Terraform but completely discard is the ability to support multiple clouds. While this is true, the reality is that each cloud works differently and makes different engineering tradeoffs, has different feature sets, etc. In the end there’s no magic bullet for deploying infrastructure seamlessly across different cloud service providers. You might be able to get away with an automated translation of one to another, but you’ll either have to architect for the lowest common denominator or you’ll lose something in translation. In the end organizations that try always end up maintaining two sets of templates.

Other approaches

I do know of some folks that are using Troposphere with some success. This provides some benefits in terms of imperative programming and the full power of Python.

Final thoughts - for now

Most people I work with get by with CloudFormation in YAML. This keeps the implementation simple and allows full integration and (mostly) faster resource support. Both Terraform and CloudFormation change often, but this is the state of things on March 1st, 2017.