http://www.slideshare.net/stelligent/testdriven-infrastructure Test-Driven Infrastructure with CloudFormation and Cucumber.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/2io88l/how_do_you_test_the_correctness_of_cloudformation/ How do you test the correctness of CloudFormation templates?
I feel like you guys haven't actually stood up much with cloudformation.
Standing up a single-legged instance in its own VPC is ~120 lines.
A more fully-functional VPC that might be used in production is going to be 200+ lines.
I have one for a WAF architecture that's >1600 lines.