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Hashicorp Sentinel vs Pulumi: What are the differences?
Introduction: Hashicorp Sentinel and Pulumi are two tools used for managing infrastructure as code and ensuring best practices in cloud deployment. However, there are key differences between them that are crucial for users to understand.
Execution Scope: HashiCorp Sentinel primarily focuses on policy as code, allowing users to define and enforce policies across their infrastructure code. In contrast, Pulumi focuses on managing infrastructure deployments and allows users to define their infrastructure using familiar programming languages.
Multi-Cloud Support: Pulumi provides support for multiple cloud providers, allowing users to deploy their infrastructure to multiple cloud environments. On the other hand, HashiCorp Sentinel's main focus is on policy enforcement and does not offer the same level of multi-cloud support as Pulumi.
Integration with Infrastructure Providers: Pulumi integrates with various infrastructure providers and orchestrators such as AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, and more, enabling seamless deployment on these platforms. HashiCorp Sentinel, however, is more focused on enforcing policies rather than direct infrastructure deployment.
Granularity of Control: HashiCorp Sentinel offers fine-grained control over policy enforcement, allowing users to define and customize policies at a very specific level. Pulumi, on the other hand, provides more flexibility in defining infrastructure using code but may not offer the same level of detailed policy enforcement.
Ease of Use: Pulumi is designed to be user-friendly and offers a simple interface for defining infrastructure using code, making it easy for developers to get started with. HashiCorp Sentinel, while powerful in policy enforcement, may have a steeper learning curve for users unfamiliar with policy as code concepts.
Community Support: Pulumi has a growing community of users and contributors, providing resources, guides, and support for users getting started with the tool. HashiCorp Sentinel also has a community of users but may not have the same level of resources available for users looking to learn more about policy as code enforcement.
In Summary, HashiCorp Sentinel and Pulumi both offer unique features and capabilities for managing infrastructure as code, with Sentinel focusing more on policy enforcement and Pulumi on infrastructure deployment and management using code.
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.
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.
AdvantagesTerraform 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.
DisadvantagesSoftware 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.
Pros of Hashicorp Sentinel
Pros of Pulumi
- Infrastructure as code with less pain8
- Best-in-class kubernetes support4
- Simple3
- Can use many languages3
- Great CLI2
- Can be self-hosted2
- Multi-cloud2
- Built-in secret management1