IaC is faster than doing things manually. If you're spending weeks on it, that sounds to me like you either haven't yet practiced enough or you're working in an

IaC is faster than doing things manually. If you're spending weeks on it, that sounds to me like you either haven't yet practiced enough or you're working in an environment that's already a mess. Once you have a bit of practice, using IaC tools is just better in every way compared to creating resources manually. It's faster, it's more consistent and robust, serves as emergency documentation and allows easy and usable change tracking and management because you can put the code in a git repository. If your Terraform manifests are going out of sync, that means your team is not actually using it and the manual, untrackable change is messing with you. I wrote the initial set of manifests for one setup (dozens of components and 3 identical environments) about 5 years ago. Since then, a different team has been expanding and managing the system and I really have no idea of everything that's there nowadays, but I do still occasionally need to go in and make changes and I can do that confidently because they kept using Terraform and I can just read the code to know what's new. I did make some mistakes (choosing Chef for CM, it wasn't a good fit in retrospect), but aggressively automating everything was not one of them. I also have one environment that I wrote which consists of a VPC, an EIP, a single EC2 instance and S3 buckets and policies for cross-account backups. I also automated that, and it definitely resulted in a better result faster than doing it manually. Turns out, even setting up a single server to run a single piece of well-packaged software (plus a local database) has a lot you need to take into account if you want to do everything properly, including backups and monitoring. On top of it, testing my backups was easy because I could just delete the whole environment and run my automation again to rebuild it, so I know that as long as there's a backup in a bucket somewhere, the system can be recovered in minutes.