@lilactown: I found Terraform easy enough to start with, despite not having any prior experience of IaC. There's a learning curve, but it does make sense to me. I like that it is declarative (like CloudFormation if I understand correctly) and I've liked its 'immutable' paradigm (create-destroy-recreate), which I've found reassuring. It forces me to consolidate everything back into my Terraform scripts, and any doubt about what might have gone wrong, kill the whole stack and restart. It's also okay for the level of provisioning/deprovisioning I'm doing so far, but what I do is fairly modest. I like that I can tune my provisioning scripts with Terraform, and once I'm happy with them then I move them to Packer. I don't have any experience of CloudFormation; however, I felt at the time that learning AWS via the Terraform abstractions might prove easier (although I can't vouch it was actually the case!).

thanks @n.duchenne. I decided to use Datomic Ions for now, which while based on CloudFormation, most of it is handled for me 😛

I think I’ll spend some time soon learning either Terraform or Ansible