Should I stop work on CfnMason or any project?

Off and on for years, and at various companies, I have developed various tools to manage complex AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks. This came out of the lack of tooling that was associated with CloudFormation itself. It was not that CFN was bad, (it is notoriously picky) it is just that it was designed with the intention of being a way to treat your infrastructure in code based manner. That is really not true. CFN was created as a templating language with defined spec.

Because of these limitations, I have built closed and open source solutions to manage the complexities that involve working with CloudFormation. Recently I even started revamping a tool that I wrote years ago to manage complex CloudFormation Stacks. This update was done on the behest of a few people that actually utilize the tool and wanted to be taken from the messy state it is currently in, into something that could be tied into their current applications. It was from this that I began working on CfnMason as a python module.

However, recently I started working with CDK. CDK is Amazon’s CloudFormation Development Kit. My first thought was that it was going to be horrible, and why would anyone ever use it. Now, this was before it was a fully supported implementation and was only really viable when used with JavaScript. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate JS, but I do most of my coding in Python these days. So, when I finally had a chance to use it for work, I found that I really like it, and that it was actually an excellent tool.

So, that brings me back to the original question. How do I know when it is time to stop working on a project? The main answer in my mind is you have to figure out that for yourself. When I started writing this, I was pretty sure that I was going to say that I am no longer going to be working on updating CfnMason. But, as I wrote this, I realized that not everyone is going to be able to move over to CDK. There are probably thousands of CFN stacks that have been created over the years, that require updates and tweaks, that are not a good fit to move over to CDK. As of yet, I don’t know of a way to take a template that is in AWS and convert it into a working CDK script so that you can develop on it from there.

This is why writing is sometimes the best way to find an answer to a problem, even technical ones. At face value, there are a number of projects that seem like they should just be discarded and never used again. But, once you analyze the situation properly, you might realize that there is a reason to move forward with development of a seemingly dead solution. It might even be to use it as a growth platform. Or, it could be that while there are new tools available, that for some, older and simpler tools are also still needed.

So, at the end of the day, what started as a note to say that I am no longer going to be working on CfnMason, has been turned around to me stating that I am going to try and get it done. Ha, yeah, even I laughed at that. Although now that the nation is in lock down, there is more of a chance that I might get it finished.