Autogeneration cloudformation. Good or bad

We are using AWS CloudFormation JSON templates to manage our infrastructure. The templates are getting bigger by the day (5k Lines) because company policy is to write certain projects in one template. I've been playing with YAML, JSON, and CloudFormation generators. I found some nice YAML generator (Spiff). Using it, I can reduce our templates by almost 90% in some cases. Is it a good idea to generate CloudFormation Templates on the fly and work mainly with Spiff YAML generators? Please keep in mind that Spiff is a bit cryptic and not pure YAML, so there's a learning curve for people maintaining the templates.

Mar 3, 2025 - 01:30

We are using AWS CloudFormation JSON templates to manage our infrastructure. The templates are getting bigger by the day (5k Lines) because company policy is to write certain projects in one template.

I've been playing with YAML, JSON, and CloudFormation generators. I found some nice YAML generator (Spiff). Using it, I can reduce our templates by almost 90% in some cases.

Is it a good idea to generate CloudFormation Templates on the fly and work mainly with Spiff YAML generators? Please keep in mind that Spiff is a bit cryptic and not pure YAML, so there's a learning curve for people maintaining the templates.