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nine_ktoday at 2:46 AM3 repliesview on HN

Any opinion on Pulumi?


Replies

gouggougtoday at 3:09 AM

Not an opinion on Pulumi specifically, but an opinion on using imperative programming languages for infrastructure configuration: don't do it. (This includes using things like CDKTF)

Infrastructure needs to be consistent, intuitive and reproducible. Imperative languages are too unconstrained. Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable (for example, it'd be easy to write code that creates a resources based on the current time of day...).

With infrastructure, you want predictability and reproducibility. You want to focus more on writing _what_ your infra should look like, less _how_ to get there.

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x3n0ph3n3today at 3:39 AM

My opinion is there are not enough good software developers doing DevOps, and HCL is simple enough and can have pretty good guardrails on it. My biggest concern is people shooting themselves in the foot because the static analysis tools available for HCL don't work with Pulumi.

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orthecreedencetoday at 5:42 AM

Pulumi is superior to Terraform for my use cases. It's actually Infrastructure as Code. Terraform pretends to be, but uses a horrible config language that tries to skirt the line between programming language and config spec, and skirts it horribly. Reorganizing modules is a huge pain. I dreaded using Terraform and I spin things up and down in Pulumi all day. No contest.

Granted, I'm a programmer, have been for a long time, so using programming tools is a no brainer for me. If someone wants to manage infra but doesn't have programming skills, then learning the Terraform config language is a great idea. Just kidding, it's going to be just as confusing and obnoxious as learning the basic skills you need in python/js to get up and running with Pulumi.

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