Any thoughts on Pulumi vs Terraform?
Unless your infrastructure is so large and managed by so many departments you need the least powerful declarative language to stay sane, my suggestion is to go with Pulumi.
It's not perfect, the whole infrastructure-as-code ecosystem is frankly pretty bad, but if Pulumi is a 6/10, Terraform is a 4/10. YMMV
If you're just getting started with Terraform be sure to check out CDK for Terraform. It allows you to drive Terraform from a variety of high-level programming languages instead of it's DSL.
What? :(
From an end-user perspective, once you have your cdktf environment setup you don't really ever have to deal with node.js at all.
I've never had a reason to dig into this very deep, but my understanding is the cdktf Python libraries use JSII Python libraries which interact with the main JSII implementation which runs under node.js. That's where the conversion from Python to HCL compatible JSON happens. Or in the case of the main AWS CDK, from your favorite programming language to CloudFormation.
More info on JSII here:
Other than that, it's really annoying way to keep infrastructure. I prefer the Terraform DSL myself, but I'm certain there is an audience that disagrees with me.
> if you think typecasting the AWS api in your local code repository is useful, then Pulumi is the way to go.
What do you mean by typecasting here? Isn't providing the types what Pulumi (or TF CDK for that sake) does by the libs it provides? I dot see how I, the consumer of those libs, needs to "type cast" anything.
> someone will find an api that AWS didn't properly typecast before releasing and then the hundreds of hours of typecasting in your local repo will be worth it.
?