[eKIK]

+1 from me on the "awful half-baked language" (HCL).

I just recently wrote an article about my experience, including issues and workarounds, when migrating from Terraform to Pulumi: https://blog.ekik.org/my-experience-migrating-my-infrastruct...

Hope it's OK that I'm sharing it here. I think it's relevant because there seems to be quite a lot of interest around Pulumi, and how one would go about moving from Terraform to Pulumi.

[mwcampbell]

I'm actually thinking of going the other way. I've been using Pulumi for several months now, and I'm thinking of moving to Terraform, because it has a so much larger third-party ecosystem, including more providers, and tools that can analyze HCL, like Infracost and security scanners. When will I learn to see the bigger picture and value popularity over quality?

[eKIK]

It's a very interesting point.

I've been part of managing rather large Terraform infrastructures (1000+ resources) for a couple of years, but I'm a Pulumi n00b with only about a month of experience.

The infrastructure I'm managing right now with Pulumi is much smaller, only around 130-140 different resources.

For me it ultimately came down to developer productivity. I'm much better at convincing Pulumi to do what I want compared to how it was with Terraform. This also makes me a much happier and less frustrated developer :).

My priorities might very well be different if I were to manage much larger infrastructures (infra cost would be more important for example).

[mwcampbell]

The stack I manage with Pulumi is currently around 300 resources. (I think that count is inflated by all the secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, because each secret has two resources: the secret and the current version.) I currently manage it by myself, but I'm hoping that won't be the case for very long.

Maybe the ending of my previous comment was too cynical. But I think I've repeatedly made the mistake of valuing my productivity and happiness as a currently solo developer over what will let my company take full advantage of a big third-party ecosystem (including a large talent pool).

[eKIK]

I don't think you're too cynical at all - I think you're exactly right! It's often much more sensible to use the "tried and true" stuff most of the time.

In my particular case I don't plan to have my company grow much at all - we're staying small. I think Pulumi is a sensible "bet" for me, because it does what I need right now really well. Sure, there's a bit of a risk, but worst case scenario I would spend a day or two to migrate what I have back to Terraform.

I would definitely not have made the call to "let's just switch everything to Pulumi" if I was still working at a larger company. As you said, a large talent pool / community is a huge deal when you have the option to hire people who can spend time learning a particular tool or language.

[0xbadcafebee]

I work in a very large shop with lots of TF and we do not use any of the "ecosystem" other than Terragrunt. Almost all of it is experimental junk.

We use almost entirely one provider, with things like a "template" or "random" provider as well, which are really just core features they decided to split off into plugins. Even when we use SaaS that there is a provider for, we don't use the provider, because we aren't constantly changing it, or managing it doesn't require lots of people across multiple teams with multiple iterations and modules.

[gerbilly]

+10 from me on the "awful half-baked language" (HCL).

Only cmake's 'language' is worse.