Opinionated Tooling
Several universities make the claim that, when deciding where to put sidewalks, they first let students wear paths through the grass. This told them where to pave and ensured the best use of their walkways.
You can think of these well worn paths in cloud architecture as a procedure, or design, that gets repeated over and over again, to the point that it should just become boilerplate. Rather than everyone composing the same 99% of code, we can generate that code, and focus on the 1% that is unique.
Opinionated tooling is designed to guide you down a path that is considered a best practice. Additionally, since best practice is the default, the amount of unique code we maintain is dramatically reduced.
Opinionated tooling doesn’t eliminate options, however, it simply assumes some sensible defaults and relies on the user to understand when it makes sense to deviate from those defaults.
Instead of writing CloudFormation from scratch to build and orchestrate ECS, ECR, EC2, ELB, VPC, and IAM resources ourselves, we can start with a smart set of defaults, and just fill in a few blanks, customizing only the parts that we want changed, and let our opinionated tool generate the boilerplate CloudFormation.
