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Pulumi vs Terraform: What are the differences?

# Introduction
This Markdown code provides a comparison between Pulumi and Terraform highlighting key differences between the two infrastructure as code tools.

1. **Programming Language Support**: Pulumi allows users to define infrastructure using familiar programming languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, and .NET, while Terraform uses its own declarative language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). This allows developers to leverage their existing skills and tools with Pulumi.
2. **State Management**: Pulumi uses its own state management system that can be stored in a variety of backends like local files, S3, or Azure Blob Storage, while Terraform relies on a single state file that can be stored locally or remotely in a backend like S3 or Azure Storage. Pulumi's approach can provide more flexibility and scalability in managing infrastructure state.
3. **Resource Dependencies**: Pulumi automatically manages dependencies between resources, ensuring that they are created and destroyed in the correct order, while Terraform requires users to explicitly define resource dependencies using the "depends_on" attribute. This can make defining complex infrastructure easier and more intuitive in Pulumi.
4. **Real-Time Updates**: Pulumi provides real-time updates and previews of changes, allowing users to see the impact of their code changes before applying them, while Terraform requires users to run the "terraform plan" command to preview changes. This can help in reducing errors and providing more visibility into the infrastructure changes with Pulumi.
5. **Cross-Resource Inputs**: Pulumi allows resources to reference output values of other resources directly within the same program, enabling easier sharing of data between resources, while Terraform requires the use of remote state and data sources to achieve similar functionality. This can lead to more streamlined and readable code in Pulumi.
6. **Support for Cloud Providers**: Pulumi offers support for a wide range of cloud providers and services, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes, while Terraform also supports multiple cloud providers but may have limited support for specific services. This can make Pulumi a more versatile choice for multi-cloud environments or specific cloud services.

In Summary, the key differences between Pulumi and Terraform lie in programming language support, state management, resource dependencies, real-time updates, cross-resource inputs, and support for cloud providers, providing users with different options based on their specific needs and preferences.
Decisions about Pulumi and Terraform
Kirill Shirinkin
Cloud and DevOps Consultant at mkdev · | 3 upvotes · 142.7K views

Ok, so first - AWS Copilot is CloudFormation under the hood, but the way it works results in you not thinking about CFN anymore. AWS found the right balance with Copilot - it's insanely simple to setup production-ready multi-account environment with many services inside, with CI/CD out of the box etc etc. It's pretty new, but even now it was enough to launch Transcripto, which uses may be a dozen of different AWS services, all bound together by Copilot.

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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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Sergey Ivanov
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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I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

  • I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
  • I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
  • I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

  • It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
  • It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
  • It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
  • It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.
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Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.

Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!

Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME

Check out the GitHub repo attached

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Pros of Pulumi
Pros of Terraform
  • 7
    Infrastructure as code with less pain
  • 4
    Best-in-class kubernetes support
  • 2
    Great CLI
  • 2
    Simple
  • 2
    Can use many languages
  • 1
    Built-in secret management
  • 1
    Can be self-hosted
  • 1
    Multi-cloud
  • 122
    Infrastructure as code
  • 73
    Declarative syntax
  • 45
    Planning
  • 28
    Simple
  • 24
    Parallelism
  • 8
    Well-documented
  • 8
    Cloud agnostic
  • 6
    It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English
  • 6
    Immutable infrastructure
  • 5
    Platform agnostic
  • 4
    Extendable
  • 4
    Automation
  • 4
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 4
    Portability
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Scales to hundreds of hosts

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Cons of Pulumi
Cons of Terraform
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Doesn't have full support to GKE

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    What is Pulumi?

    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.

    What is Terraform?

    With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

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    What companies use Pulumi?
    What companies use Terraform?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Pulumi or Terraform.
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    What tools integrate with Pulumi?
    What tools integrate with Terraform?

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