Personally I prefer the "Configuration as Data" abstractions more than a whole programming language, but I'm a little biased because I'm working on https://docx.guku.io/docs/intro because at the end of the day all this code will be used to generate JSON data for IaaS APIs, so why write code and control flow to generate declarative JSON data? (more complexity) this is the closes thing I found to a manifesto about the configuration as data approach https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/kpt/blob/main/docs/design-docs/06-config-as-data.md

However the cloud is more than the abstraction and simplification, it has many business use cases, -as-code is a way to abstract things, k8s is another way, wish he can find the product-market-fit soon, for now, a better dev experience on as code should have its own market, but it is hard to do right.

and it is already competitive, terraform first make is more market friendly, but I doubt even terrraform has its own challenge on standardization, every enterprise just has its own ways of defining the cloud. Love to hear more people how they define the cloud usage.