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Personally I find YAML for cloudformation worse than JSON because of the whitespacing requirements. JSON isn't much better mind, especially once your template r

Personally I find YAML for cloudformation worse than JSON because of the whitespacing requirements. JSON isn't much better mind, especially once your template reaches to hundreds of lines with nested objects. Recently I've come around to using Troposphere [1] to write cloudformation templates, it's actually very pleasant to use. You just write your infrastructure in python, and it will generate you a template at the end. The developers seem to respond quickly to changes AWS make to the CF templating language too. [1] https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere

GhostVII 9y ago
JSON is a subset of yaml, so if you want to just use JSON it should still work.
arusahni 9y ago
+1 for Troposphere. It reduces the noise from your CF template while bringing the flexibility and ease-of-use of Python. I've also discovered that it's far easier to get new developers spun up on than Terraform.
cle 9y ago
I'm sorry, what? You don't like YAML because it uses whitespace as a delimiter instead of curly braces? That is probably the least important feature that YAML adds for CF templates. YAML, despite its warts, is much more readable and maintainable for CF templates than JSON, particularly when you are doing non-trivial things and need to use a lot of intrinsic functions and string manipulation. Or you want to put comments in your template. I've worked on huge JSON and huge YAML CF templates (I'm talking templates that are thousands of lines long--in YAML). YAML is without a doubt easier to maintain. I can't recommend any CF libraries for generating templates either, unless you want to wait around for new CloudFormation features to be implemented or suffer from half-broken existing implementations (or waste time hunting down bugs and submitting patches). Sometimes it makes sense to use a template engine like Jinja or ERB. But I'd stay away from libraries that generate CF templates--they're mired with missing edge cases and they're mostly an unnecessary dependency.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  One supports inline comments, the other doesn’t. That should be enough for anyone to choose one over the other.
- sbennettmcleish 9y ago
  Absolutely agree! Have been smashing out YAML templates for 12mths with pleasure (3yrs of JSON templates beyond that), comments are the winning proposition, allows neat sectioning of various parts.
geerlingguy 9y ago
Doesn’t Python also have some pretty strict whitespace requirements?

GhostVII 9y ago

JSON is a subset of yaml, so if you want to just use JSON it should still work.

arusahni 9y ago

+1 for Troposphere. It reduces the noise from your CF template while bringing the flexibility and ease-of-use of Python. I've also discovered that it's far easier to get new developers spun up on than Terraform.

cle 9y ago

I'm sorry, what? You don't like YAML because it uses whitespace as a delimiter instead of curly braces? That is probably the least important feature that YAML adds for CF templates. YAML, despite its warts, is much more readable and maintainable for CF templates than JSON, particularly when you are doing non-trivial things and need to use a lot of intrinsic functions and string manipulation. Or you want to put comments in your template. I've worked on huge JSON and huge YAML CF templates (I'm talking templates that are thousands of lines long--in YAML). YAML is without a doubt easier to maintain. I can't recommend any CF libraries for generating templates either, unless you want to wait around for new CloudFormation features to be implemented or suffer from half-broken existing implementations (or waste time hunting down bugs and submitting patches). Sometimes it makes sense to use a template engine like Jinja or ERB. But I'd stay away from libraries that generate CF templates--they're mired with missing edge cases and they're mostly an unnecessary dependency.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
One supports inline comments, the other doesn’t. That should be enough for anyone to choose one over the other.
sbennettmcleish 9y ago
Absolutely agree! Have been smashing out YAML templates for 12mths with pleasure (3yrs of JSON templates beyond that), comments are the winning proposition, allows neat sectioning of various parts.

geerlingguy 9y ago

Doesn’t Python also have some pretty strict whitespace requirements?