I see a roughly even split of people using CFn, Terraform and (Python) CDK.
AWS shot themselves in the foot by making the Python version of CDK second-tier after Typescript; IaC is still done by DevOps people far more often than application people, and DevOps people use Python.
Another gripe is the number of services and new features which launch without CFn support, which also blocks CDK support; when Terraform supports a new platform feature before the vendors own tools do, that's a sign the product teams are being driven by the wrong metrics.
And as far as TF supports services before CFT. Guess which is easier for an AWS employee to do - getting the CF service team to support a new service or just contribute to Terraform’s open source project?
I know of at least one service where the service team introduced the needed APIs and then an employee of AWS wrote the TF provider and contributed to the project before AWS’s own internal team added it to CFT.
Source: former AWS ProServe employee. I am not referring to myself as the author.
Terraform really drove CFN to even pretend to care about resource support. It’s typically day 1 now, but only because NAT Gateways took so long it was embarrassing for AWS.
Idk if I buy this. I’m mostly a backend service developer, but my team manages our own infra using CDK and we love it. And we’re glad they used typescript as it’s a fantastic language.
> Python version of CDK second-tier after Typescript
What? It's not second-tier at all, every single feature in Python is in sync with TypeScript, the library versions are in sync, and the docs for all the languages are auto-generated. They're not second-tier, they're 100% single tier.
IME quite a few of those auto-generated docs (mostly the examples) have slight incorrectness, where the code snippet is a mangled mix of Python and TS.
Also, the tooling you need to drive CDK is all TS-based, which means I now need to think about NPM and Node versions occasionally, which are not relevant in any other part of my workflow.
Admittedly as someone in scientific computing I am unusually far from the JS/TS ecosystem - but all I can tell you is that it feels second tier as a user.
AWS shot themselves in the foot by making the Python version of CDK second-tier after Typescript; IaC is still done by DevOps people far more often than application people, and DevOps people use Python.
Another gripe is the number of services and new features which launch without CFn support, which also blocks CDK support; when Terraform supports a new platform feature before the vendors own tools do, that's a sign the product teams are being driven by the wrong metrics.