Heads up: Our Ideas Factory has been refreshed, levelled up, and grown-up into Alphero Intelligence. Some of our old posts are pretty cool tho'. Check this one out.
- How to automate infrastructure as code on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
- Making developers and devops engineers lives easier
- May be multi-cloud is the future
Why not just use Terraform?
Although Terraform has its place and is probably the best-known IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tooling with a large community, it has some drawbacks to consider. Let's say upfront no IaC solution meets everyone's needs, and when we are looking at cross-provider tools they will always be playing catch-up with the evolution of vendor's own IaC, like Cloud Formation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, etc. There is always a need to understand the vendor's specific approach to infrastructure and where these differ from each other.
Pulumi allows you to stay within the same language and use the same paradigms as your primary applications, for example Typescript. This makes developers and devops engineers lives easier, with less switching, and utilising the same development environment or tooling for everything. Terraform has released its own version of this called CDKTF but this is still in the early version with minimal adoption.
Another reason to look at Pulumi is the open-source approach. This means less tie-in with a vendor and their specific toolchain (and the risk of changing charging models). As well as, being part of a community of growth and the ability to build out functionality that's not available.
Our hope is to find a nice option to build multi-cloud solutions that sits within the existing toolsets, we'll keep you updated on our journey.