Overview

Azure Resource Manager

Stacks40

Followers93

Votes11

GitHub Stars64

Forks47

Pulumi

Stacks306

Followers293

Votes25

GitHub Stars24.1K

Forks1.3K

Azure Resource Manager vs Pulumi: What are the differences?

Introduction

Azure Resource Manager and Pulumi are both infrastructure-as-code tools that help provision and manage cloud resources. However, they have some key differences that set them apart.

Language Support: Azure Resource Manager (ARM) uses JSON or Azure Resource Manager Templates (ARM Templates) as the primary language for defining the infrastructure. On the other hand, Pulumi supports multiple languages such as Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, and Go, allowing developers to choose a language they are comfortable with.
Provider Support: ARM is specific to the Azure ecosystem and provides a comprehensive set of resource providers for managing Azure resources. Pulumi, on the other hand, supports multiple cloud providers including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes, making it a cross-cloud platform for managing resources.
Resource Modeling: ARM uses a declarative approach to resource modeling. Developers define the desired state of the infrastructure, and ARM handles the creation and management of resources to achieve that state. Pulumi, on the other hand, uses a imperative approach where developers write actual code to define and manage resources, giving them more flexibility and control over the infrastructure.
Programmability: ARM provides a REST API and Azure CLI for interacting with Azure resources programmatically. Pulumi, on the other hand, offers a rich programming model with SDKs for various programming languages, allowing developers to leverage the full power of their chosen language to define and manage resources.
Stack Management: ARM manages resources at a subscription level, and resources are grouped into resource groups. Pulumi introduces the concept of stacks, which are isolated instances of the infrastructure. This allows developers to manage different environments or variations of the infrastructure using separate stacks.
Continuous Delivery: ARM supports continuous delivery through Azure DevOps or other CI/CD tools, allowing for automated deployments. Pulumi also supports continuous delivery and integrates well with popular CI/CD tools. However, Pulumi's imperative approach to infrastructure management provides more flexibility in implementing complex deployment and automation scenarios.

In Summary, Azure Resource Manager and Pulumi differ in terms of language support, provider support, resource modeling, programmability, stack management, and continuous delivery capabilities.

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Advice on Azure Resource Manager, Pulumi

Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.

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Comments

Sergey

Contractor at Adaptive

Apr 17, 2020

Decided

Overview

We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.

Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.

Advantages

Terraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.

Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.

Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.

Disadvantages

Software is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.

Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.

Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Azure Resource Manager	Pulumi
It is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription. You use management features, like access control, locks, and tags, to secure and organize your resources after deployment.	Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.
Deploy app resources; Organize resources; Control access to resources	Containers - Deploy a Docker container to production in 5 minutes using your favorite orchestrator.; Serverless - Stand up a serverless API or event handler in 5 minutes using a real lambda in code.; Infrastructure - Manage cloud infrastructure or hosted services using infrastructure as code.; CoLaDa - Embrace containers, lambdas, and data, using a modern, multi-cloud framework.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 64	GitHub Stars 24.1K
GitHub Forks 47	GitHub Forks 1.3K
Stacks 40	Stacks 306
Followers 93	Followers 293
Votes 11	Votes 25
Pros & Cons
Pros 4 Bicep - Simple Declarative Language 2 RBAC and Policies in templates 1 Infrastructure-as-Code 1 Deep integration with Azure services like Azure Policy 1 Over 1K samples the QuickStart repo	Pros 8 Infrastructure as code with less pain 4 Best-in-class kubernetes support 3 Simple 3 Can use many languages 2 Can be self-hosted
Integrations
Kubernetes Docker Ruby Terraform rkt	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Azure Resource Manager, Pulumi?

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Habitat

Habitat is a new approach to automation that focuses on the application instead of the infrastructure it runs on. With Habitat, the apps you build, deploy, and manage behave consistently in any runtime — metal, VMs, containers, and PaaS. You'll spend less time on the environment and more time building features.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to specify all the resources needed for your application in a declarative format using yaml.

AWS Cloud Development Kit

It is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. It uses the familiarity and expressive power of programming languages for modeling your applications. It provides you with high-level components that preconfigure cloud resources with proven defaults, so you can build cloud applications without needing to be an expert.

Yocto

It is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture. It provides a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded and IOT devices, or anywhere a customized Linux OS is needed.

GeoEngineer

GeoEngineer uses Terraform to plan and execute changes, so the DSL to describe resources is similar to Terraform's. GeoEngineer's DSL also provides programming and object oriented features like inheritance, abstraction, branching and looping.

Atlas

Atlas is one foundation to manage and provide visibility to your servers, containers, VMs, configuration management, service discovery, and additional operations services.