Yes Pulumi is nice. Having the power of Typescript types (if you choose Typescript) is amazing.
The thing is I haven't used Terraform extensively so I can't compare.
The main downsides I found are probably IaC downsides in general. Such as scenarios where you need to click-ops to repair because only some of the infra was deployed. I think the clouds need to make their stuff IaC friendly to avoid this though.
My main fear is taking on that dependency on something newer. With Terraform if the company goes bust, the community could take over, and probably it would become an Apache project. Maybe Pulumi would too. It is not good enough for it to be open source. It needs to keep up with the daily changes in the cloud.
Strong agree here - I am still keeping an open mind about TypeScript - using it for frontend / Vercel web apps and while maintaining open-source examples.
I will say it was very nice getting the type hints for infrastructure while developing as well as hints about something being unused, etc.
It overall worked better than I was probably expecting.
Also agree with your points on the pain of IaC - it's terrific when it works but there's always those special "except this resource doesn't follow any of those rules" cases to make things painful and extra complex.
I've also found that IaC can have a chilling effect for folks who haven't ever tried it before - it's a powerful abstraction tool - but at the end of the day you also need some level of understanding around what is happening under the hood - where to debug an error (which level), etc.
Comments
Yes Pulumi is nice. Having the power of Typescript types (if you choose Typescript) is amazing.
The thing is I haven't used Terraform extensively so I can't compare.
The main downsides I found are probably IaC downsides in general. Such as scenarios where you need to click-ops to repair because only some of the infra was deployed. I think the clouds need to make their stuff IaC friendly to avoid this though.
My main fear is taking on that dependency on something newer. With Terraform if the company goes bust, the community could take over, and probably it would become an Apache project. Maybe Pulumi would too. It is not good enough for it to be open source. It needs to keep up with the daily changes in the cloud.
Strong agree here - I am still keeping an open mind about TypeScript - using it for frontend / Vercel web apps and while maintaining open-source examples.
I will say it was very nice getting the type hints for infrastructure while developing as well as hints about something being unused, etc.
It overall worked better than I was probably expecting.
Also agree with your points on the pain of IaC - it's terrific when it works but there's always those special "except this resource doesn't follow any of those rules" cases to make things painful and extra complex.
I've also found that IaC can have a chilling effect for folks who haven't ever tried it before - it's a powerful abstraction tool - but at the end of the day you also need some level of understanding around what is happening under the hood - where to debug an error (which level), etc.