Deciding between Terraform and CloudFormation

Terraform is an offering from Hashicorp and uses Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) for resource definitions. It is commonly adopted by organizations working with multiple cloud providers as it offers a standard templating scheme. Functionally, it works just like CloudFormation – that is, it directly consumes underlying service APIs from the cloud provider. Other benefits such as code version control, change tracking, and automation are more or less similar to what we already covered in the context of CloudFormation.

Getting started with either of the two to manage sizeable workloads is easy. The difference comes to the surface when you’re dealing with a huge number of resources in a multi-account, multi-region organizational structure. Let’s discuss some areas where these tools are uniquely positioned.

Third-party provider ecosystem

Terraform lets you manage much more than just AWS resources. With support...