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Comment by nerdbaggy | Hacker News Reader

I have been using more and more of https://www.pulumi.com/ for my deployments. It’s nice that the deployment code is written in js/python/go/.net so I can make it as customizable as I want.

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I'm seriously considering switching to pulumi, mostly because it seems a lot more flexible. Not to mention that developers are already familiar with the language rather than having to learn all the quirks and inconsistencies of hcl on top of using the tool itself

In a polyglot shop, it can actually be quite handy that HCL is it's own relatively simple language.

From my ~1 year of experience with terraform, the simplicity of HCL leads to some pretty complicated config. In particular the absence of a true if, and the inability to define custom functions, or use any kind of condition or iteration on modules.

try out https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk i've had success with it thus far. i'm mostly using mainstream providers at this point though.

Yup that is why we use it. And it’s great since anything can be a data source

I keep seeing this popup in search results, and I'm curious to try it in anger.

I've recently switched roles, and have gone from sharing a pretty large terraform deployment on AWS/GCP to managing infrastructure written with cloudformation and troposphere.

(Trophosphere is a python library that generates cloudformation templates. Nice to have a real programming language, but still pretty constrained by the fact that the output is "just" cloudformation.)

Of the two I have had less pain with terraform, but both have caused their days of pain in different ways.

I cannot recommend Pulumi enough. Terraform was a huge step up from Ansible, and Pulumi is the same step up from Terraform.

Writing a for loop to provision multiple machines just feels incredibly natural.

I agree, I'm using pulumi with ts and it's pretty great to be able to develop / test my deployment pipeline using the same tools as my core services.

Terraform has released something very similar, but not stable yet: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/cdk-for-terraform-enabling-py...

Same here, at my previous work, they used python to generate terraform hcl. I told them you might as well use pulumi

yup. pulumi has much more same syntax and management.

however, some parts still use terraform underneath. if stuff doesnt work - i sometimes find myself on terraform docs/code.

but all in all a good trade off for me compared to pure terraform.

To clarify, Pulumi does not use Terraform - it simply uses the CRUD operations from some Terraform providers. The core of Terraform is not involved.

Seconded. Pulumi is great.

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