How do you choose between a provider native template service, Terraform and a CDK style tool?

Weigh provider coverage, the review experience and what your team already knows. Provider native templates integrate tightly and need no state management but lock you in and are verbose. Terraform has broad provider coverage and a clear plan output, at the cost of managing state. CDK style tools give you a real programming language and abstraction, which helps large teams but can hide what is actually being created.

I judge on four things: does it cover everything I need to manage including the non provider pieces, how good is the diff I get to review before a change, what does state management cost me, and what does the team already know. Provider native templates win on integration and need no state file, but they only ever manage that provider, so I still need something else for the DNS provider or the identity system, and now I have two tools. Terraform covers all of that with one workflow and gives a plan that is genuinely reviewable, and the price is running a state backend properly. A CDK style tool is attractive when I want abstraction and typed constructs, and it suits a large platform team building reusable patterns, but the diff is a generated template rather than the code that produced it, so reviewing intent gets harder and a loop can quietly produce forty resources. My tiebreaker is almost always what the team can maintain at three in the morning. A slightly less elegant tool everyone understands beats an elegant one that one person can debug.