After Week 8, you've seen seven tools: CloudFormation's Nested/Cross-Stack, StackSets' Service-managed, Custom Resource's ResponseURL protocol, Hooks' pre-validation, CDK's Construct levels and Pipelines self-mutation, Terraform tfstate locking. Tests don't present these tools separately. Hard-difficulty exam questions embed three, four of them simultaneously within one scenario asking "which tool solves this where." Today builds that integrated sense.
Before problem-solving, organize again. IaC tools divide into three axes: abstraction layer, governance scope, change timing. Abstraction climbs CFN(YAML) → SAM(macros) → CDK(code)