I've been working now around 8 years with cloud stuff. Not a lot of years compared with many of you here, but still enough to feel confident about my dislikes being more than just ignorance or inexperience.
I really wish AWS conceded the IaC war and stopped putting resources into Cloudformation. I never suffer as much as when I have to work with CF. The only worse thing I can think of is having to interact with Azure, which around 5 years ago was a terrible experience all around with regard to automation.
Going back to my CF rant: As soon as you get into any amount of complexity (and this also includes CDK, as it inherits all of CF problems), like for example using nested stacks and custom resources, it becomes almost impossible to troubleshoot incidents and problems. Error messages are obtuse. Fail states are too frequent. Update and deploy times are incredibly slow. Working with CF makes me reconsider my whole job every time. I curse the day that I chose to ignore my general precaution with CF and go for a database (Opensearch) managed with CDK.
There's a night and day difference between managing infrastructure state with Terraform and CF. Terraform also has its quirks and warts, of course, but at the very least there's very little that cannot be recovered by yourself. And it is also fast enough. CF is mostly a black box of misery.
I really wish AWS conceded the IaC war and stopped putting resources into Cloudformation. I never suffer as much as when I have to work with CF. The only worse thing I can think of is having to interact with Azure, which around 5 years ago was a terrible experience all around with regard to automation.
Going back to my CF rant: As soon as you get into any amount of complexity (and this also includes CDK, as it inherits all of CF problems), like for example using nested stacks and custom resources, it becomes almost impossible to troubleshoot incidents and problems. Error messages are obtuse. Fail states are too frequent. Update and deploy times are incredibly slow. Working with CF makes me reconsider my whole job every time. I curse the day that I chose to ignore my general precaution with CF and go for a database (Opensearch) managed with CDK.
There's a night and day difference between managing infrastructure state with Terraform and CF. Terraform also has its quirks and warts, of course, but at the very least there's very little that cannot be recovered by yourself. And it is also fast enough. CF is mostly a black box of misery.