[aschleck]

I found that using "helm template" to convert every Helm chart into yaml, and then using Pulumi to track changes and update my clusters (with Python transformation functions to get per-cluster configuration) made my life so much better than using Helm. Watching Pulumi or Terraform watch Helm watch Kubernetes update a deployment felt pointlessly complicated.

[jpgvm]

I do the same with Tanka + Jsonnet, definitely a million times better than dealing with Helm itself or god forbid, letting it apply manifests.

[personomas]

What about using terraform instead of Pulumi? Why did you pick Pulumi for this?

[aschleck]

This is both a good thing and a bad thing, but Pulumi is way more flexible than Terraform. I wanted to have a cloud-provider-specific submodule that created resources (like EKS and GKE) that then exported output values (think kubeconfig), and then I wanted the parent module to pass those in as inputs to a cloud-provider-independent submodule. Terraform couldn't do it without needing to duplicate a ton of code, or without something heinous like Terragrunt (not sure it even would have worked.) Pulumi makes it trivial and in a language I like writing.

Additionally, our applications consume our cloud configuration (eg something that launches pods on heterogenous GPUs needs to know which clusters support which GPUs, our colo cluster has H100s but our Google cluster has A100s etc.) Writing in the same language in the same monorepo makes it very easy to share that state.

[totallywrong]

With Pulumi you really are programming infrastructure in a language of your choice. HCL is a bad joke in comparison.

[notnmeyer]

i am hearing this more and more from folks.