Cloudformation scripting is terrible because it's based entirely on editing JSON. Ugh. Human UNfriendly.
I'd tried several editors. Amazon's editor (for Cloudformation), online editors, and plain ol' vi.
Props to this guy for extending JSON editing for my friendly goto editor, vim:
https://github.com/elzr/vim-json
techie tinkering for all. I'm also a nerd @ Red Hat.
