I have been critical of AWS’ Cloudformation feature as suffering from the “worse than useless” syndrome. After initial deployment of a template, the moment you change either the template or the infrastructure, they are out of sync with each other, unless you manually sync the changes. CloudFormer improves things: you can effectively sync a changed environment by completely recreating the template from it (ugh). But there still is no elegant way to sync updates in either direction.
I raise the topic here because it seems a linkage between CloudFormation templates and Chef could be cool: a tool that could parse Cloud Formation template changes and drive Chef to instantiate those changes in the running environment. It would effectively create a declarative wrapper around Chef for Amazon environments.
Jeff