Well that’s not entirely true. I believe I said in the article that there are people who do amazing work with CloudFormation, and there’s some reusable CloudFormation code out there that can save you a lot of time if you just invoke it with Terraform’s aws_cloudformation_stack resource. I know I’ve used it to launch SES receipt rules, Hashicorp Vault clusters, EKS clusters (even though the *excellent* EKS module exists), and other things that can just be picked from the clouds.

But even then, another factor worth considering with CloudFormation is service quotas. Clearly, if you’re going to hit these service quotas then you’re using automation tools at a very large scale! But I *have* written Terraform states that create over 1,000 resources in the past.

(That doesn’t make me decent at my job; I’ve just done it, for good or ill. :) )