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Comment by cmclaughlin | Hacker News Reader

> Any thoughts on Pulumi vs Terraform?

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.

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk/

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> Getting Started with Python. Prerequisites: Terraform >= v0.12, Node.js >= v12.16

What? :(

I believe both the aws cdk and this use code generation to create the libraries for languages other than typescript, and you're reliant on the typescript package for updates to those libraries.

Hmm, how do you mean? Doesn't the Python code generate JSON that Terraform then reads?

cdktf the cli is all js iirc, this is because the underlying library (jsii) is all js.

Indeed... technically you don't have to use the cdktf CLI. For instance, I typically run "python main.py" to synthesize from Python to Terraform.

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:

https://aws.github.io/jsii/overview/runtime-architecture/

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