My opinion is that just because you can interact with AWS APIs with Ansible it means that you should. I think it's good to use AWS interaction with Ansible for

My opinion is that just because you can interact with AWS APIs with Ansible it means that you should. I think it's good to use AWS interaction with Ansible for things like dynamic inventory and the orchestration of certain tasks (e.g. stop a group of instances, switch load balancer config between blue/green deployments, etc.). That said I don't think it's that much worse than Cloudformation because it suffers from the same lack of statelessness and idempotency that you need to engineer around.