What IAC tool(s) are you using for AWS?

[opethdisciple]

As above, we are planning to go all in on AWS at work but we only have experience with Ansible.

There has been talk of Terraform etc... but no one has any experience with it to really say it's the way to go.

What are you using and why?

A lot of the internet seems to suggest a mixture of a few tools for the job.

 

[n30_mkii]

Massive fan of TF here, but we also heavily use CloudFormation. Loads of pros and cons for each, however main benefits of TF are;

• state management which makes things idempotent and can remediate any manual drift
• support for additional providers so you can do more than Aws
• reusable skills for other clouds if you wish
• better support for service announcements i.e often quicker and broader than CF
• Works well with cross account orchestration
• good integration with other hashicorp products

I would say fo TF and you will be glad you did. Once you have competency in it, other iac tools are easy. Loads of comparisons out on the net, also reddit has many threads on the subject.

 

[n30_mkii]

Happy to discuss more in depth if needed at any point

 

[memyselfandi]

We use Terraform. Its ok and you can do clever things with it with out having to dig too deeply (i also use it at home to spin up test systems on AWS as I can run up an entire environment, then use it, and then more importantly destroy it completely with one command).

You need to consider how you are going to do revision control on your Terraform code and what things you are going to put into and how you are going to split things up as you don't necessarily want to have everything in one plan.

Also consider that there have been changes on how things are done with the recent releases which can mean that a lot of the things you see online is now outdated.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

Pulumi > Terraform