Because we don't want to abstract the cloud provider (and potentially lock us out of any Amazon-specific behavior), we use a small Python script that takes Jinj

Because we don't want to abstract the cloud provider (and potentially lock us out of any Amazon-specific behavior), we use a small Python script that takes Jinja2-templated YAML and compiles it to JSON. It also handles the uploading to S3 and a whole bunch of convenience macros for generating the more verbose parts of defining infrastructure in CloudFormation. It took a lot of hair-pulling to write it, but now that it's done, CF isn't so terrible to use.