> Before you hop on board with this "pain free" solution, you should accept the fact that you may end up maintaining this [...] True, although ongoing maintena

> Before you hop on board with this "pain free" solution, you should accept the fact that you may end up maintaining this [...] True, although ongoing maintenance of a CloudFormation template isn't significant. It's essentially a specification of the state of the infrastructure, which AWS is then responsible for making come true. It's also their stuff from CloudFormation back, so they're on the hook for making sure nothing changes that would break it (relative to Terraform or other alternatives). Also keep in mind that AWS services are usually encapsulated from each other, which is a good thing. The result, though, is that defining something like this involves a lot of parts. You need to define its private network, its subnet masks, its EC2 instance types, its database type and configuration, etc. The author also took it a step further to define CloudWatch alarms and scaling policies, which is great. It is something that requires understanding if changes are necessary, but it's not something that you would expect to need tweaks over time. > There should be easier way There is--he could have started Wordpress by just launching an instance with userdata that installs it and sets it up. This isn't really comparable to that because it involves multiple servers behind a load balancer, a CDN, a hosted DNS zone, a separate relational database service instance, and autoscaling.