Products · Product
CloudFormation
Raised as a usability problem by 30 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2015–2024), in 30 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Newcomers struggle to get started with poor documentationUnreviewed
20152026- Poor documentation and slow, painful iteration when developing infrastructure templates2024-09-17
- Templates become huge and hard to review because there is no abstraction2024-03-18
- Documentation is poor for newcomers, making it hard to get started2022-04-07
Failed stacks roll back entirely and can get stuck with no way to recoverUnreviewed
20152026- Failed stacks roll back entirely and can get stuck with no way to recover2020-12-16
- Stacks get stuck in weird states with no control or visibility to fix them2019-05-06
- Stack gets stuck with no recovery path; cancelling retries the broken lambda and hangs for hours2018-07-14
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 32 complaints
- Poor documentation and slow, painful iteration when developing infrastructure templates2024-09-17
- Templates become huge and hard to review because there is no abstraction2024-03-18
- Writing JSON/YAML infrastructure templates is extremely painful and frustrating to work with2024-01-30
- JSON templates become repetitious and hard to express with nested structure and pseudoparameters2023-08-05
- Deployments are extremely slow and fail in absurd ways2022-11-12
- Documentation is poor for newcomers, making it hard to get started2022-04-07
- Almost impossible for normal developers to use competently2021-11-14
- Using YAML as a pseudo-programming language is painful and frustrating to work with2021-10-31
- Templates are unreadable and hard to edit, and deploying takes many commands2021-06-08
- Using CloudFormation feels soul-destroying, with a poor overall user experience2021-04-15
- Failed stacks roll back entirely and can get stuck with no way to recover2020-12-16
- Event rows reshuffle on every refresh and columns are oversized, hard to read2020-11-23
- Custom resources take hours to time out and drift must be fixed manually2020-11-15
- Takes about 10 minutes to learn whether code runs or which part failed2020-07-27
- Working with CloudFormation is annoying without extra tooling, and stack outputs cannot be imported easily2020-05-10
- Can't review changes for mistakes before it starts modifying resources2020-03-14
- Many resource properties force replacement on update, and some resources are nearly useless2019-06-19
- Workflow is long and slow; generated instances sometimes cannot be deleted without AWS support2019-05-23
- Poor documentation and errors that search can't find solutions for2019-05-23
- Stacks get stuck in weird states with no control or visibility to fix them2019-05-06
- Console is opaque and slow, and mistakes take hours to surface2019-04-14
- Developers can't use CloudFormation directly; needs abstraction layers to be usable2019-03-26
- Obscure property names and errors make templates hard to get right2019-02-08
- CloudFormation is difficult to use and could be much easier2018-11-23
- Testing custom resources takes an hour when the reply JSON is wrong, due to timeout2018-10-23
- Stack gets stuck with no recovery path; cancelling retries the broken lambda and hangs for hours2018-07-14
- Documentation gaps force many trial-and-error attempts before anything works2018-07-13
- Docs teach little, forcing guesswork with minutes-long deploy feedback loops2017-06-18
- Self-referencing security groups were a huge pain to configure2017-03-18
- Failed CloudFormation changes are very hard to fix, often needing AWS support2016-08-03
- Template validation is a mess, and bigger templates make it worse2015-12-26
- Visualization unusable and takes two minutes to load large templates2015-10-27