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seanedwards
cfer
Ruby2015–2018
seanedwards / cfer

cfer

Toolkit and Ruby DSL for automating infrastructure using AWS CloudFormation

Systems & InfrastructureDevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
9Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
90GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Toolkit and Ruby DSL for automating infrastructure using AWS CloudFormation

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

Terraform, as an idea, is brilliant. Mitchell and company isolated a hugely important need and tried to fill it, and I give them all the credit in the world for that.…

eropple used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:19:25 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-07-02 14:52:17 UTC to 2018-01-27 18:13:17 UTC.

01232015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 commentsJul 20152015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsOct 20162016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJan 2018

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jul 20152015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC321
Aug 20152015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20152015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20152015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20152015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20152015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jan 20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20162016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Apr 20162016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20162016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20162016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20162016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20162016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Sep 20162016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20162016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20162016-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20162016-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Feb 20172017-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20172017-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20172017-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20172017-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20172017-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20172017-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20172017-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20172017-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20172017-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20172017-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20172017-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

1 sources
eropple·Dec 26, 2015Recommendation phrase
Terraform, as an idea, is brilliant. Mitchell and company isolated a hugely important need and tried to fill it, and I give them all the credit in the world for that. Cross-platform cloud provisioning? Gimme. But I cannot in good conscience not relate what a disastrous experience Terraform has been for me at both jobs and clients. Writing reusable code in Terraform is an exercise in frustration due to the extreme clumsiness of HCL (which, I understand, was used because "YAML is complicated"--well, that's true, but YAML isn't a good solution either, you're HashiCorp, you wrote Vagrant, you already know how to do this!). The application architecture is reckless and full of race conditions; your state will be hosed if one resource errors out at the wrong time, while other resources are being successfully updated--the resources that return su
Read the rest
ccessfully after the failed resource will on many occasions fail to be persisted to state. What's more, application testing seems to be at best an afterthought: there have been regressions in the providers that will break your existing states. I would under no circumstances use Terraform if I didn't have clients who had selected it before I was working with them. If in AWS, I would use CloudFormation, with a tool like Cfer[1] (which is excellent, reliable code) or SparkleFramework[2] (which is more full-featured but I hope you never need to debug it) to provision my stuff. (Full disclosure: I'm building a much, much better provisioner for multi-provider cloud infrastructure. Neither of the projects I recommend are mine; mine's not done yet.) [1] - https://github.com/seanedwards/cfer [2] - http://www.sparkleformation.io/
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