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Comment by packetlost | Hacker News Reader

I have absolutely nothing good to say about Pulumi. Stay far, far away.

My experience with Pulumi is you can write bad pulumi code and good pulumi code and just like everything else, it's easy to end up in a codebase where one poor soul was tasked with writing it all and they didn't do the best job with it.

Please expand on your experiences, because I've had great luck with Pulumi at my company since October 2021. No engineer liked HCL, our demographic was engineers who were familiar with programming languages who wanted to self service basic infrastructure (AWS SecretsManager, IRSA roles, Databricks Service Principals, etc). We were pretty easily able to shim in a RunAtlantis inspired system that displayed previews that required explicit approval when a PR was raised, performed apply on merge to main, and ran drift checks periodically.

For me, the ideal is each team owns its own config/lifecycle mgmt, and does it in the language they wrote the rest of the system in.

Their stack builds a lot of abstractions on top of each other and this works only well as long as you don't deviate from the beaten path.

One example:

You can't really build custom TS providers for AWS resources.

Why?

Because this feature is built using the compilation magic that makes inline lambdas work.

But the compilation step omits the AWS SDKs since these are present in a lambda anyways. So you can't use the AWS SDK in custom providers.

Why? I’ve had nothing but good experiences, but I don’t run it and the team that does is extremely competent

Strange, I have a lot of good things to say about both it and Terraform.

Probably some specifics might be more useful there...

My experience is that by stealing providers from Terraform, they failed to properly handle statically typed languages (Go) with certain providers (HCloud); I had problems with their ID type and had to abandon my Pulumi setup.

Have a look at https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and tell me what you think. We don't have enough docs though. Tough being an open source thing that you want to keep open.

Running SST with Pulumi and it's been a great experience. Infrastructure and maintenance has been pleasant and SST's pre-fabs really make things easy to spin up resources.

please expand on this, I am interested (for real!)

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