Hey everyone! I've been working with Terraform and Terragrunt for a while now, and I really appreciate its DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) approach to infrastructure setup. However, my new job requires me to use CloudFormation to build everything from the ground up, mainly for audit and compliance reasons. I've done some research, and it seems there's a lot of negativity towards CloudFormation these days, especially in 2026. I've had some exposure to it before, but that was just when I was experimenting with AWS, not in a production setting. I've heard about using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) too, which seems like a better option compared to the Serverless Application Model (SAM). Any tips or insights would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
CDK does generate CloudFormation under the hood, but it’s quite different from Terraform. With CDK, you can use languages like Python, Java, or TypeScript to create your infrastructure. Just curious, what audit reasons are making them stick to CloudFormation directly?
Probably for easier drift detection and since everything is handled by AWS, they want to keep state management in-house.
I'd recommend going with CDK and then synthesizing the CloudFormation templates for audit purposes. Many people find CDK a lot easier to work with than plain CloudFormation.
I’ve heard that too! It's definitely worth considering, unless you can convince them to skip CF altogether.
Honestly, I find Terragrunt to be much less DRY compared to Sceptre for managing CloudFormation. Yes, Terragrunt has a larger community, but to me, it often ends up feeling like spaghetti code while I usually have a neat three-line YAML setup for each environment with CloudFormation.
Interesting! This is the first time I’m hearing about Sceptre, despite my hours of research. CDK seems to be the big talk lately, but I’ll definitely check it out—thanks!
Honestly, it sounds like they want to avoid using external tools, sticking strictly to native AWS solutions. That's just their agenda, I guess!