Both CloudFormation and Terraform are tools that allow a dev to define Cloud Resources (databases, networks, permissions, instances, all that) as code/markup, a

Both CloudFormation and Terraform are tools that allow a dev to define Cloud Resources (databases, networks, permissions, instances, all that) as code/markup, and then run those markup files through their respective engines (CloudFormation or Terraform) and have those resources get created/modified/whatever. They both have their drawbacks, Terraform obviously suffers from not being a first-class service to AWS (since their service CloudFormation is a direct competitor). It is also possible to accidentally discard your Cloud "state" file, that keeps track of every instance that already exists and its current state (so TF can do a "diff" on what is there vs. what you're trying to apply), which definitely causes some headaches. In my experience the benefits of the design decisions from the tool far far outweigh any of the cons. On the contrary, I have never had a good experience with CloudFormation. The workflow is long/slow, some of the AWS Best Practices are hilariously bad (looking at you "Paste this entire Python file as a text string into a yaml file), and more than a few times have I gotten into a state where CF-generated instances cannot be deleted and require the intervention of an AWS Rep.