Rain has been my favorite way to deploy CloudFormation stacks for the past couple of years, so seeing it deprecated is disappointing. The project is archived, with no planned releases, bug fixes, security patches, or ongoing review of issues and pull requests. Existing binaries will remain available, but users are being directed toward tools such as the AWS CLI, CDK, cfn-lint, and cfn-guard. How difficult would it be for the community to take over maintenance, and what are people using instead—especially for features like formatting, directives, S3 references, and reviewing CloudFormation change-set diffs?
4 Answers
For basic deployment, the AWS CLI is probably enough. Using CloudFormation deploy with the option to ignore empty change sets covers the main workflow, although Rain’s change-set diff is the feature I’ll miss most.
CDK is the obvious recommendation if you want to define reusable infrastructure in code, but it isn’t a direct replacement for everyone. If you mainly work with existing CloudFormation templates, the AWS CLI plus separate validation and policy tools may be a better fit.
The deprecation is a reminder that even an officially released tool can end up with very limited long-term maintenance. It seems the CloudFormation tooling team is small, and maintaining the whole collection of utilities may have become difficult. A community takeover would be welcome, but it would still need active maintainers and a clear scope.
Rain filled quite a few usability gaps in the AWS tooling. I originally used it for formatting, then started relying on its directives and its handling of S3 references without manually passing template parameters between stacks. It would be great if a community maintainer adopted those features or if some of them eventually made their way into the AWS CLI.
The change-set diff was the main reason I used Rain too. There are separate tools that can render those diffs, but there doesn’t seem to be a single replacement that covers everything.