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Endless repetitions – we need to repeat constantly when writing it. It is error-prone as well as hard to maintain. YAML and JSON flavors do not support any fragments or smaller templating engine, so it is difficult to reuse and work in line with DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle.
Is this something you can get with node anchors?
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Great question! I believe you can’t, I’ve tried while ago.
TL;DR: CloudFormation does not support that, see here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-formats.html - it does not support hash merges, effectively you cannot use anchors.
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Working on a tool which is effectively a layer on top of an Amazon service feels like a risky business. If you demonstrate that the need exists, what’s to stop them waking up tomorrow to quickly build an in-house duplicate?
Nothing. ;) If AWS will build something better, that’s a great thing - way to go!
It’s not our primary business. We would love to have such facilities in place already. We build that tool in order to ease the pain regarding maintaining a pile of templates - for our convenience.