top | item 21826958

(no title)

santoriv | 6 years ago

I really hope this book has some discussion regarding Pulumi in addition to the normal Terraform discussion. My team switched over to Pulumi recently after using Terraform for a couple of years and it's so much easier to work with. It would be a shame if it is not at least included in the discussion.

discuss

order

arkadiyt|6 years ago

I've seen lots of comments (not just on HN) about how Pulumi/CDK are easier, more powerful, etc. This is probably true from the perspective of someone writing infrastructure as code. Working in security I spend more time _reading_ pull requests for infrastructure as code, and I think Terraform's declarative syntax is 100% superior in that regard. Being able to see the infrastructure without trying to mentally execute code, and being able to run static analysis tools against your infrastructure, make it my preferred infrastructure as code tool.

pathseeker|6 years ago

>and being able to run static analysis tools against your infrastructure

Is the Pulumi/CDK code too dynamic to support static analysis?

DanHulton|6 years ago

I had never heard about it before reading this comment, and just going and checking out the video on the front page, I am blown away.

I have to be honest, I hadn't messed around with Terraform before, but I've been working with Ansible/CloudFormation and Pulumi is just on another level. There are so many hacks you need to do to work around CloudFormation peculiarities, and separating stack creation and manipulation into two separate formats is frustrating at best.

Going to have to play around Pulumi more seriously when it's time to stand up more servers.

vageli|6 years ago

> I really hope this book has some discussion regarding Pulumi in addition to the normal Terraform discussion. My team switched over to Pulumi recently after using Terraform for a couple of years and it's so much easier to work with. It would be a shame if it is not at least included in the discussion.

Could you speak more to some of the ways it was easier to work with? How was the transition and what was the migration strategy?

kamilafsar|6 years ago

Total IaC n00b here.

3 weeks ago I set up our AWS infrastructure with Terraform but somehow I never got it to work correctly (somehow the AWS Elastic Beanstalk health checker never turned green).

Just this week I decided to migrate to Pulumi and after a few very explanatory good error messages I got it to work. I'd say Pulumi's error messages are superior.

Another major benefit of Pulumi is that you can use typescript (and others) to script your setup. Terraform supports some scripting [1] but you have to take a few hours to learn it, and it never will be as powerful as plain ts/js/py.

[1] https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-terraform-0-12-prev...

yourapostasy|6 years ago

Just looking between the two (where I'm at we've adopted Terraform), I wish where I'm at would switch to Pulumi as well. After seeing the contortions required under Terraform when someone strays from Terraform's pre-conceived notions embedded into HCL DSL, I'm convinced that at-scale (>200 servers, arguably >100 servers), there is no satisfactory way around the "learn to code" requirement in devops at this layer interacting with infrastructure.

zokier|6 years ago

AWS CDK was what came to my mind as "next gen" infra as code, sounds like Pulumi has somewhat comparable approach

mcescalante|6 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this, my org is in the process of evaluating various options for Infrastructure as code stuff and Terraform is very high up on that list. I don't believe Pulumi has been discussed and looks quite good, always nice to be able to suggest it before adoption.

In some quick searching, Pulumi has a high level (and assumedly biased) comparison between Terraform and itself: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/vs/terraform/