Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SirensOfTitan | Hacker News Reader

Didn’t Pulumi accelerate its adoption by the use of Hashicorp terraform providers? Didn’t AWS use elastic search for free then fork when the license changed? I think there are a lot of challenges around building a sustainable business around OSS that requires a more delicate look than the black or white hot takes around here recently.

…with that being said, I will say that I welcome companies like Pulumi to the IaC landscape. IaC makes a lot of sense conceptually, but unlike a lot of HN (from my perspective), I strongly dislike terraform and HCL and most Hashicorp products. There’s also enough of an impedance mismatch between TF and cloud providers that I’d be poised to just use cloud formation or ARM or something native over tf, which was never cloud agnostic anyway like their marketing claims.

I don't ever recall getting the feeling that Terraform was cloud agnostic when I was new to IaC. There is different providers within it that provide platform-specific resources which is self explanatory.

Terraform is cloud agnostic the way a fork is food agnostic. It's a tool, if you were thinking the tool abstracted clouds in a "write once deploy everywhere" way (which HashiCorp's marketing has hinted at), you probably shouldn't be using it.

Terraform providers weren’t relicensed under the BSL.

Yes Pulumi accelerated its adoption, but many Terraform providers aren't maintained by Hashicorp but other companies or individuals.

Please do not use ARM in 2023, Bicep is a much nicer alternative for a native IaC language.

It's certainly an improvement over ARM, but I was a little disappointed with Bicep when I recently used it for the first time - it's great for simple cases, but expressing logic makes things more verbose and 'icky' than I'd like. Then again, it's not a problem I've spent any time in, so maybe this is as good as it gets; I'll still be using Bicep over ARM regardless.

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