AWS CloudFormation became a programming language (2018)

… kind of.

Declarative has its advantages which are hyped all over the internet so I’ll skip that part. The painful downside of declarative approach is often the expressivity. Sample proofs:

• People generate CloudFormation files.
• Size of the Puppet standard library, which I mentioned under “Limited DSL limitations” in my older post “Please don’t use Puppet“.
• Terraform is enhancing the DSL (HCL)
  • HashiCorp Terraform 0.12 Preview (official blog post)
  • Terraform becomes a programming language (my post about this)

Now you can have Python embedded in your CloudFormation file. That is part of the CloudFormation Macros which were introduced on 2018-09-06.

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Happy coding, everyone!