CloudFormation is native to AWS and integrates tightly with service control policies and stack sets for multi-account governance. Terraform offers multi-cloud portability and a large module ecosystem.
UK enterprises often use Terraform for platform teams and CloudFormation for product squads embedded in AWS-only estates. State management, drift detection, and policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel) are decision factors.
DevOps engineers should be comfortable reading both — interviews frequently ask you to compare trade-offs rather than declare a single winner.