We had a tough time with Terraform on AWS. The syntax is undeniably better than Cloudformation and having the concept of modularity built in is a big win. Howe

We had a tough time with Terraform on AWS. The syntax is undeniably better than Cloudformation and having the concept of modularity built in is a big win. However, when things went wrong we ended up with cryptic error messages and often when `terraform up` failed, then `terraform destroy` would fail too, leaving us using AWS console to jump in and start clearing up the resources. Particularly painful because AWS has no awareness that your stack came from a Terraform config, so you have to navigate through the subresource menus destroying things one-by-one. We ended up switching over to Cloudformation. The extra verbosity does suck, but the tooling for running/updating stacks feels far safer. We can review the changeset when we update the stack, view a realtime event log as resources are created, deleted or updated, and best of all we can always tear the stack down from a single point.