Different approaches to managing infrastructure in AWS

Many years back, when I was starting with infrastructure automation on AWS, I used to bundle together some CLI commands in a Bash script and fire it off when new AWS accounts required bootstrapping. It worked like a charm for basic setups but surfaced limitations in other areas such as ongoing management, updates, stack removals, extracting resource identifiers, and so on. Every requirement would transform into more scripts being developed and managed, which of course was not a scalable solution.

Secondly, it was difficult for other team members to contribute to these scripts as they didn’t have an operations or scripting background. This is where something more declarative such as AWS CloudFormation/Terraform could have helped them easily get started. There will always be a tipping point in your AWS infrastructure automation journey where you would like to switch from one approach to another as your needs outgrow the...