Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Helm vs Pulumi: What are the differences?
Introduction
Both Helm and Pulumi are popular tools used in the world of infrastructure and application deployment. While they serve similar purposes, there are several key differences between the two.
Package Management: Helm is primarily focused on package management for Kubernetes, providing a way to define, install, and update applications in a Kubernetes cluster. It uses a packaging format called charts, which encapsulate all the necessary resources, dependencies, and configuration for an application. On the other hand, Pulumi offers a more general-purpose infrastructure as code platform, allowing you to define and manage infrastructure resources across different cloud providers using programming languages like JavaScript, Python, and Go.
Imperative vs Declarative: Helm follows an imperative approach, where you define a series of steps and actions to deploy an application. You explicitly specify the desired state of your deployment. Pulumi, on the other hand, takes a declarative approach, where you define the desired end state of your infrastructure using code. Pulumi then determines the necessary actions to bring the actual state of the infrastructure to match the desired state.
Infrastructure Provisioning: Helm is primarily focused on application deployment within a Kubernetes cluster. It assumes that the underlying infrastructure, such as the cluster itself, is already provisioned. Pulumi, on the other hand, can not only deploy applications but also handle infrastructure provisioning. It provides abstractions to create and manage various cloud resources like virtual machines, storage, networks, etc., across different cloud providers.
Language Support: Helm uses its own templating language called Helm Template, which is based on Go templates. These templates allow you to define and manipulate Kubernetes resources. Pulumi, on the other hand, supports multiple programming languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Go. This gives you the freedom to choose a language you are more comfortable with and leverage its full power to define and manage your infrastructure.
Extensibility and Community Support: Helm has a large and active community with a vast collection of pre-built charts available in the official Helm chart repository. This makes it easy to reuse and share application templates. Pulumi also has an active community, but being a relatively newer tool, it may have a smaller ecosystem of available resources. However, Pulumi provides the flexibility to use any existing third-party library, npm package, or Python module, making it highly extensible and adaptable.
Managed Service Integration: Helm operates as a standalone tool, independent of any cloud provider. It can be used with any Kubernetes deployment, whether it's on-premises or in the cloud. Pulumi, on the other hand, deeply integrates with various cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. It provides enhanced support for managing and provisioning cloud-specific resources and services.
In summary, Helm is primarily focused on package management for Kubernetes applications, using an imperative approach and a packaging format called charts. Pulumi, on the other hand, is a general-purpose infrastructure as code platform with support for multiple programming languages and cloud providers, enabling both infrastructure provisioning and application deployment.
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 Helm
- Infrastructure as code8
- Open source6
- Easy setup2
- Support1
- Testability and reproducibility1
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
What is Helm?
What is Pulumi?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use Helm?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Helm?
What tools integrate with Pulumi?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+34