I'm not a CloudFormation superfan, but... 1. Yup. 2. In my experience, the error message is usually fine, but there are many times where it's completely obtus

I'm not a CloudFormation superfan, but... 1. Yup. 2. In my experience, the error message is usually fine, but there are many times where it's completely obtuse. 3. They just added a new feature to help with this. When you get ROLLBACK_FAILED, you can now tweak things and retry the rollback. It has helped me a few times not have to contact support recently. 4. 100% agree. I write all my templates in yaml, which helps a lot. I really hope they just add native yaml support. Example[1] 5. You can now create custom resources using Lambda from within your templates, which is pretty cool. Example[1] edit: I should add that at my company, we mostly use Terraform now. I still like to use CF for projects that will be open-sourced though, as I don't want step 1 of my instructions to be "install terraform". [1] https://github.com/zwily/sqs-to-lambda-via-lambda https://github.com/zwily/sqs-to-lambda-via-lambda