The real advantage of CloudFormation comes in combining it with the AWS APIs -- you can define your infrastructure as code in Python, NodeJS, Java, Ruby, &c. *

The real advantage of CloudFormation comes in combining it with the AWS APIs -- you can define your infrastructure as code in Python, NodeJS, Java, Ruby, &c. * troposphere (Python): https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere * cloudform (JavaScript, TypeScript): https://github.com/bright/cloudform https://github.com/bright/cloudform Driving infrastructure with a general purpose programming language actually works pretty well in practice. As things have developed, I've come to question infrastructure-specific external DSLs, like Salt, Terraform, even Chef to some extent. Infrastructure is not any less programmable than payments, machine learning, graphics, app servers. Why can't the tooling be provided as libraries, consumable from ordinary programming languages?