AWS CloudFormation
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“modular, reusable CloudFormation stacks for infrastructure”
“It's not the best "control plane" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.”
Show 3 more
“It’s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container.”
“I don’t know Terraform or the CDK. I use CloudFormation.”
Caveats and dissent
“cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason”
“Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow.”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run 2 mentions
- Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026) 1 mention
- BYOC Is Not Just 'Deploy into Their Cloud' 1 mention
- Floci – A free, open-source local AWS emulator 1 mention
- I'm OK being left behind, thanks 1 mention
- What Are Your Guilty Displeasures? 1 mention
Also written as AWS CloudFormation. Data: aws-cloudformation.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 15
“modular, reusable CloudFormation stacks for infrastructure”
“It's not the best "control plane" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.”
“It’s never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container.”
“cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason”
“Cloudformation deployments are criminally slow.”
“I used it to generate a bunch of cfn”
It’s 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’t need Helm charts, your internal Confluence doesn’t need HA K8s clusters, your Grafana is cheaper on ECS than GKE, and your zScaler estate flatly doe
“CloudFormation on another”
“But the CFTs are standard.”
“it did perfectly with code but took some going back and forth with infrastructure as code”
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’ve 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’t “vibe code”. I keep my ha
“I don’t know Terraform or the CDK. I use CloudFormation.”
“from OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes, to Ansible”
“your life will assuredly be better with Copilot instead of CDK, CloudFormation”
“Skills: AI agents, Python, Node.js, AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFormation, Terraform, RDS, Pytest, Docker, Kubernetes”