Terraform has interested me for a while, and I've been meaning to give it a try, but haven't had a chance just yet.

From what I have seen so far though, there isn't really that much difference/benefit over CloudFormation. We currently have 95% of our resources in AWS with about 4% in Azure, and 1% in Google Cloud. It's great that Terraform is 'mulit-cloud' but it still seems like you have to write .tf's catered to each cloud, you can't just lift and shift to another cloud by copying and pasting a file?

People say the 'plan' feature is one of the advantages over CFN, but as far as I can tell, CFN now offers the same feature... it tells you what's going to change when you upload a new stack.

I sound like a CFN advocate now, but I genuinely don't have that much experience with it, and really do want to give Terraform a chance. Convince me?

Oh, and since CFN started supporing YAML it looks easier to write too

We're not quite at the point where even the "comparable" cloud services across clouds are drop-in compatible with each other, so this is not going to be possible for a while for reasons not related to Terraform.

> I sound like a CFN advocate now, but I genuinely don't have that much experience with it, and really do want to give Terraform a chance. Convince me?

You could spend your time learning either a vendor-specific tool (CFN), or a vendor agnostic one (Terraform). Since Terraform can do a lot of what CFN does, it may make sense to spend your time learning Terraform instead.

Edit: not sure about CFN, but Terraform is open source: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform