{"slug": "aws-cloudformation", "name": "AWS CloudFormation", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 9, "warners": 2, "score": 1.988, "rising": 1.67, "first": "2025-11-03", "latest": "2026-10-15", "why": "It's not the best \"control plane\" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 4, "neutral": 4, "compare": 1, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "It's not the best \"control plane\" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.", "kind": "", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/1strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example", "official_url": "https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["CloudFormation", "AWS CloudFormation"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 801661874, "item_id": 50103867, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103867", "by": "mohamedawad9k8", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "modular, reusable CloudFormation stacks for infrastructure", "excerpt": "Location: Cairo, Egypt Remote: No Willing to relocate: Yes (Germany, Netherlands) Technologies: AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, ECS, Terraform, GitOps, ArgoCD, Helm, Istio, Vault, Prometheus, Grafana, Backstage, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Python, Node.js, TypeScript, SQL, MongoDB. R\u00e9sum\u00e9/CV: https://resume.mo2cloud.com/cv Email: mohamed.awad9k8@gmail.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamedawad9k8/ Website: https://", "context": "", "use_case": "Infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 787884000, "item_id": 49242750, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242750", "by": "nickmonad", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's not the best \"control plane\" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.", "excerpt": "> Our experience is that vendor should make the new upgrade available and notify the customer, customer can run its change-control pipeline and approve the version, the control plane automates rollout/health-check/rollback, etc. As it stands today, we have an AWS-only product (for better or worse) so we can accomplish this already with CloudFormation. It's not the best \"control plane\" as far as updates and rollbacks ", "context": "Vendor with an AWS-only product", "use_case": "Deploying customer infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "BYOC Is Not Just 'Deploy into Their Cloud'"}, {"id": 759957520, "item_id": 47497345, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497345", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It\u2019s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container.", "excerpt": "I have been using a modified version of this for 8 years. I didn\u2019t write it https://github.com/1Strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example/blob/master/fargate.yaml It\u2019s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container. Also as far as rollbacks just use \u2014disable-rollbacks. The only time I\u2019ve had CFT get stuck is using custom resources when I didn\u2019t have proper error handling and I didn\u2019t s", "context": "", "use_case": "Fargate infrastructure deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"}, {"id": 750085684, "item_id": 46880355, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880355", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But the CFTs are standard.", "excerpt": "I just checked, Puluni does have a good track record of keeping up with AWS. But using a non industry standard framework (Stevio) just doesn\u2019t make any sense from a long term portable career perspective. While I\u2019m not a fanatic about which one I use out of the major ones. My last three projects were CDK/Typescript, Terraform and CloudFormation with my own collection of utility scripts I\u2019ve used over 5 years to make i", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stelvio: Ship Python to AWS"}, {"id": 748394704, "item_id": 46774669, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774669", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I don\u2019t know Terraform or the CDK.  I use CloudFormation.", "excerpt": "Anything I know the best practices on how to architect. I don\u2019t do \u201cagentic coding\u201d. I treat AI as a junior developer I have to tell everything and check the work at every phase. I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. I know AWS well (trust me on this). I don\u2019t know Terraform or the CDK. I use CloudFormation. I was very comfortable not knowing either on projects because I knew I could troubleshoot issues", "context": "cloud consulting specializing in app dev", "use_case": "infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What software / applications can you now build thanks to AI"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 759955616, "item_id": 47497226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497226", "by": "drzaiusx11", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason", "excerpt": "We all have personal AWS environments and use them as need arises at my org. Doesn't stop the fact cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason. Basic shit like pushing a new ECS task takes 10+ minutes alone. Need to push an IAM policy change by itself? 5 minutes. Maybe it's the CDK, but we've only been on that a couple years, prior we used a ansible and cloudformation templates ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"}, {"id": 759644065, "item_id": 47477754, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477754", "by": "drzaiusx11", "date": "2026-03-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow.", "excerpt": "This is why I use LocalStack today. I can stand up all my infra for my teams 14 microservices in under 30s and test my in flight changes, all without an internet connection. Deploying to our real staging environments take 30m (literally) for a single CDK / cloudformation stack change. The fact I have an immediate feedback loop saves my team inordinate amounts of time. Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow. I", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Floci \u2013 A free, open-source local AWS emulator"}]}], "who": [{"by": "nickmonad", "context": "Vendor with an AWS-only product", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242750", "date": "2026-08-10"}, {"by": "raw_anon_1111", "context": "cloud consulting specializing in app dev", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774669", "date": "2026-01-26"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["infrastructure as code", "deploying customer infrastructure", "fargate infrastructure deployment", "infrastructure deployment", "generating infrastructure templates", "aws infrastructure"], "compared": [{"slug": "terraform", "name": "Terraform", "co": 10, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "aws-cdk", "name": "AWS CDK", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pulumi", "name": "Pulumi", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude-code", "name": "Claude Code", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "ansible", "name": "Ansible", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "kubernetes", "name": "Kubernetes", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "firebase", "name": "Firebase", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "localstack", "name": "LocalStack", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47493657", "title": "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922568", "title": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49163466", "title": "BYOC Is Not Just 'Deploy into Their Cloud'", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471801", "title": "Floci \u2013 A free, open-source local AWS emulator", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47454341", "title": "I'm OK being left behind, thanks", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47204784", "title": "What Are Your Guilty Displeasures?", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "compare": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 2, "warn": 2}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 801661874, "item_id": 50103867, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103867", "by": "mohamedawad9k8", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "modular, reusable CloudFormation stacks for infrastructure", "excerpt": "Location: Cairo, Egypt Remote: No Willing to relocate: Yes (Germany, Netherlands) Technologies: AWS, Kubernetes/EKS, ECS, Terraform, GitOps, ArgoCD, Helm, Istio, Vault, Prometheus, Grafana, Backstage, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Python, Node.js, TypeScript, SQL, MongoDB. R\u00e9sum\u00e9/CV: https://resume.mo2cloud.com/cv Email: mohamed.awad9k8@gmail.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohamedawad9k8/ Website: https://", "context": "", "use_case": "Infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 787884000, "item_id": 49242750, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242750", "by": "nickmonad", "date": "2026-08-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It's not the best \"control plane\" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.", "excerpt": "> Our experience is that vendor should make the new upgrade available and notify the customer, customer can run its change-control pipeline and approve the version, the control plane automates rollout/health-check/rollback, etc. As it stands today, we have an AWS-only product (for better or worse) so we can accomplish this already with CloudFormation. It's not the best \"control plane\" as far as updates and rollbacks ", "context": "Vendor with an AWS-only product", "use_case": "Deploying customer infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "BYOC Is Not Just 'Deploy into Their Cloud'"}, {"id": 759957520, "item_id": 47497345, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497345", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It\u2019s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container.", "excerpt": "I have been using a modified version of this for 8 years. I didn\u2019t write it https://github.com/1Strategy/fargate-cloudformation-example/blob/master/fargate.yaml It\u2019s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container. Also as far as rollbacks just use \u2014disable-rollbacks. The only time I\u2019ve had CFT get stuck is using custom resources when I didn\u2019t have proper error handling and I didn\u2019t s", "context": "", "use_case": "Fargate infrastructure deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"}, {"id": 759955616, "item_id": 47497226, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497226", "by": "drzaiusx11", "date": "2026-03-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason", "excerpt": "We all have personal AWS environments and use them as need arises at my org. Doesn't stop the fact cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason. Basic shit like pushing a new ECS task takes 10+ minutes alone. Need to push an IAM policy change by itself? 5 minutes. Maybe it's the CDK, but we've only been on that a couple years, prior we used a ansible and cloudformation templates ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"}, {"id": 759644065, "item_id": 47477754, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47477754", "by": "drzaiusx11", "date": "2026-03-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow.", "excerpt": "This is why I use LocalStack today. I can stand up all my infra for my teams 14 microservices in under 30s and test my in flight changes, all without an internet connection. Deploying to our real staging environments take 30m (literally) for a single CDK / cloudformation stack change. The fact I have an immediate feedback loop saves my team inordinate amounts of time. Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow. I", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "Floci \u2013 A free, open-source local AWS emulator"}, {"id": 759290288, "item_id": 47455643, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47455643", "by": "mekael", "date": "2026-03-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used it to generate a bunch of cfn", "excerpt": "I had an heavy ai user on my team say that \u201cthose who learn how ti use the tools wont get fired, those who dont are gone\u201d. I used it to generate a bunch of cfn and it worked fine from an example and a couple line prompt, doesnt seem that hard to learn to me. Now reviewing the 1k lines it generated and making sure its secure, thats going to take me longer than writing it by hand.", "context": "", "use_case": "Generating infrastructure templates", "switched_from": "", "story": "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"}, {"id": 755648277, "item_id": 47228017, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47228017", "by": "stego-tech", "date": "2026-03-02", "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "It\u2019s the IT career requirement to keep abreast of everything in tech while being cursed to know most of it is various forms of unnecessary for the supermajority of IT/Enterprise use cases. A few highlights: * Most infrastructure does not need Kubernetes. Your ERP doesn\u2019t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn\u2019t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doe", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "What Are Your Guilty Displeasures?"}, {"id": 755392419, "item_id": 47212026, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212026", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-03-01", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "CloudFormation on another", "excerpt": "Now ask a junior dev to design a concurrency implementation. To know the complete in my case AWS SDK and write a script in 3 minutes. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/boto3/latest/ Or do the same for IAC - same surface area - and use Terraform on one project, CloudFormation on another, and the CDK on a third and to generate code for you when you give them the correct architecture. It took me a day to do that before AI dep", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI is making junior devs useless"}, {"id": 750085684, "item_id": 46880355, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880355", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-02-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But the CFTs are standard.", "excerpt": "I just checked, Puluni does have a good track record of keeping up with AWS. But using a non industry standard framework (Stevio) just doesn\u2019t make any sense from a long term portable career perspective. While I\u2019m not a fanatic about which one I use out of the major ones. My last three projects were CDK/Typescript, Terraform and CloudFormation with my own collection of utility scripts I\u2019ve used over 5 years to make i", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stelvio: Ship Python to AWS"}, {"id": 749192226, "item_id": 46824514, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46824514", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-01-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "it did perfectly with code but took some going back and forth with infrastructure as code", "excerpt": "From my recent experience doing a project that involved setting up AWS infrastructure with CloudFormation - a VPC, subnets, docker based lambda s, SNS, SQS, etc - and the code on top of it, it did perfectly with code but took some going back and forth with infrastructure as code The first thing I did was keep everything as decoupled as possible with so it would be simple for Codex and Claude Code (I use both) to reas", "context": "", "use_case": "AWS infrastructure", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: How far has \"vibe coding\" come?"}, {"id": 748584435, "item_id": 46786527, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46786527", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "I hate to tell you this - but you are completely wrong and you need to learn how to use modern tools to do your job. Source: Professional software developer (or adjacent) for 30 years and I\u2019ve worked in cloud architecture for 8 years working with both cloud architecture and software developer - at startup, then working at AWS directly and now a staff consultant at a third party firm. I don\u2019t \u201cvibe code\u201d. I keep my ha", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 748394704, "item_id": 46774669, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774669", "by": "raw_anon_1111", "date": "2026-01-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I don\u2019t know Terraform or the CDK.  I use CloudFormation.", "excerpt": "Anything I know the best practices on how to architect. I don\u2019t do \u201cagentic coding\u201d. I treat AI as a junior developer I have to tell everything and check the work at every phase. I work in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. I know AWS well (trust me on this). I don\u2019t know Terraform or the CDK. I use CloudFormation. I was very comfortable not knowing either on projects because I knew I could troubleshoot issues", "context": "cloud consulting specializing in app dev", "use_case": "infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What software / applications can you now build thanks to AI"}, {"id": 743465605, "item_id": 46466600, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466600", "by": "cube2222", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "from OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes, to Ansible", "excerpt": "Spacelift | Remote (Europe) | Full-time | Senior Software Engineer | $80k-$110k+ (can go higher) We're a VC-funded startup (recently raised $51M Series C) building an infrastructure orchestrator and collaborative management platform for Infrastructure-as-Code \u2013 from OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes, to Ansible. On the backend we're using 100% Go with AWS primitives. We're looking fo", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2026)"}, {"id": 734035474, "item_id": 45877217, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877217", "by": "CharlieDigital", "date": "2025-11-10", "stance": "compare", "quote": "your life will assuredly be better with Copilot instead of CDK, CloudFormation", "excerpt": "If you are on AWS and you are not using the (unfortunately named) Copilot CLI[0], you're opting in to the full complexity of AWS. Copilot fortunately makes most common scenarios waaaay easier to build, setup, and deploy including building staged environments following best practices for AWS (separate accounts; I know, in and of itself kind of a pain in the ass). It encodes the most common types of application backend", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "How AWS is losing the younger generation with complexity"}, {"id": 732854420, "item_id": 45803401, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45803401", "by": "LaraHealth", "date": "2025-11-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Skills: AI agents, Python, Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, Terraform, RDS, Pytest, Docker, Kubernetes", "excerpt": "Lara Health | https://lara.health | Senior Back-end Engineer| USA | REMOTE | Full-time Lara Health is on a mission to transform how healthcare is delivered for chronic care management. We enhance patient care, improve operational efficiency, and create new, diverse revenue streams for healthcare organizations. Skills: AI agents, Python, Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, Terraform, RDS, P", "context": "", "use_case": "cloud infrastructure provisioning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)"}]}