> (and I have no idea what you're referring to by 'cloud-provided orchestration tools' beyond these two specifically), - AWS: cloudformation - GCP: deployment

> (and I have no idea what you're referring to by 'cloud-provided orchestration tools' beyond these two specifically), - AWS: cloudformation - GCP: deployment manager https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/quickstart https://cloud.google.com/deployment-manager/docs/quickstart I imagine other clouds have similar tools (or perhaps they have converged towards more general ones like Ansible or Terraform). As for your disagreement: you're free to have your own opinion on this. But my personal experience has been that eventually converging infrastructure provisioning systems like CF have complex failure modes that make it hard to modularize and scale them up. With terraform: the cloud provider is reduced to a dumb API, and most of the issues you see can be resolved client side. Whereas when dealing with issues with cloudformation, its not something you can figure out yourself, you need to hope that the error is something that's clearly displayed to you and/or open a support tix with AWS.