Why Switch to Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code?
Posted on
The cloud promised to revolutionize your business.
Faster innovation. Lower costs. Unlimited scalability.
But for many companies, that promise remains frustratingly out of reach. Instead of accelerating product development, infrastructure has become a bottleneck. You and your team (DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering teams) are bogged down by:
- Clunky tools and manual processes
- Provisioning a simple test environment takes days
- Rolling out updates across regions takes weeks
- The combinations of modern cloud architectures seems infinite
You know there has to be a better way. A way to truly harness the power of the cloud and turn it into your competitive advantage.
But how?
Enter Pulumi – the open source infrastructure as code (IaC) platform that gives 10x better scale, productivity, and time to value for thousands of companies worldwide.
So why should you switch to Pulumi? How is it different from other infrastructure as code tools? This post should answer all those questions.
What is Pulumi?
Pulumi is an infrastructure as code platform that allows you to manage and scale infrastructure, configurations, policies, and secrets with programming languages. Pulumi facilitates clear collaboration across your infrastructure, development, and security teams.
Pulumi’s approach is better.
10x Better. Pulumi takes a unique and 10x better approach to infrastructure as code by empowering you with the familiar languages and tools you love for application development. While modern programming languages have evolved to provide powerful features like AI copilots, Intellisense, linting tools, testing frameworks, and CICD pipelines, infrastructure management has lagged behind, relying on rigid scripting languages and error-prone manual processes. Pulumi bridges this gap by allowing you to use industry-standard programming languages to manage infrastructure with the same level of sophistication and tooling you enjoy for application development. Pulumi embraces the change and direction the industry is going, so you never fall behind with your IaC tooling.
Powering the Next Wave. Pulumi is at the forefront of the industry. It helps you embrace the latest practices (e.g., Platform Engineering, GitOps) and builds the latest technologies (e.g., AI Copilots) into the core user experience. It also helps you build and manage new technology paradigms (e.g., AI workloads, LLMs, internal developer platforms).
Powerful Automations. Another unique approach is that Pulumi makes it easy to automate and scale modern cloud architectures. In the last decade, the industry has moved from monolithic to microservices architectures, which operate as distributed systems over shared infrastructure platforms, to achieve greater resilience, team agility, flexible scaling, and modular codebases. The cloud's programmability, infinite elasticity, and on-demand nature made it easy to spin up micro-sized services tailored to business demands, facilitated by technologies like containers, Kubernetes, and serverless. Pulumi empowers you to apply software engineering to manage infrastructure of this modern and immense scale.
AI-Powered. Pulumi builds AI into the core infrastructure management experience. Pulumi combines the power of large language models with semantic understanding of the cloud to unlock greater insights and controls over managing cloud infrastructure. Pulumi leverages the familiar GPT experience you know, love, and use daily, so you can find and take action on any resource in your cloud environments.
Ok, but why does this matter enough for me to switch?
Only you can answer that question, but there are some compelling reasons to adopt the platform trusted by hundreds of thousands of developers.
Faster Time to Value. Your company moved to the cloud to
increase innovation and reduce costs. However, getting infrastructure to
developers is a frequent bottleneck for you which can slow down
prototyping new products or shipping new features. Spinning up new
development or testing environments takes days and rolling out
production updates across many regions can take weeks. The existing
tools don’t allow you to set security and compliance guardrails and
enable easy self-service of infrastructure.
Pulumi will speed up your deployments and time to value.
Open Platform Commitment. Some platforms, such as Terraform, have
altered their licensing and introduced uncertainty. They are no longer
true open source, and they tie their previously open source software to
their commercial services. The lack of an open source approach fragments
the community and introduces proprietary constraints to cloud
infrastructure.
Pulumi provides you with an approach to open source and community that
provides stability and choice.
Increased Productivity. You expect your tools and workflows to keep up with the industry: AI copilots, Intellisense, linting tools, testing frameworks, and CICD pipelines. But most of these innovations are just for building applications and services and not for infrastructure, configurations, policies, and secrets. Existing infrastructure tools are fraught with bad UX, rigid scripting languages, and error prone manual processes.
Pulumi will increase your productivity and velocity through better tooling.
Infinite Scale. Modern cloud architectures are distributed systems that are microservices that are dynamic and ephemeral in nature. The number of infrastructure resource types and the configurable input properties is staggering. You face the daunting task of how to combine these resources to solve their unique problems. Without software engineering, managing these modern distributed systems is fruitlessly manual.
Pulumi uses software engineering to tackle the scale of infinite combinations.
Customers of Pulumi frequently experience 100% productivity increases, 99% time saved, and 10x acceleration when using Pulumi compared to what they were using before.
Frequently Asked Questions - Why Pulumi?
Here are some frequently asked questions about why you should choose Pulumi based on the following use cases and alternatives:
Why Pulumi, by use case?
There are many different use cases for why you might use Pulumi: infrastructure CICD, modern applications, internal developer platforms, AI/ML workloads, and infrastructure modernization. Below are more details on two popular use cases.
Why Pulumi for Internal Developer Platforms?
You and your team may build internal developer platforms (IDPs) to maximize the use of the cloud at scale across the company while being secure and compliant, so your development teams can ship faster. There are a number of components/layers that are considered basic requirements when building an internal developer platform. The layers are as follows:
Developer Control Plane. Curated experiences that empower developers by meeting them at their level of expertise, whether it's an abstracted developer portal, custom CLI, or shared IaC templates.
Integration & Delivery. Automations to version control, test, trace, and deploy all infrastructure from resources, configurations, environments, and secrets as well as orchestration automations to manage provisioning workflows.
Monitoring & Logging. Components to log, monitor, and observe all infrastructure for greater operational control as well as optimize against unnecessary costs.
Security & Identity. Security and compliance guardrails that regulate every piece of infrastructure from policies to fine-grained access controls to secrets.
Resources. Providers that support modern cloud architectures such as Kubernetes, containers, serverless, generative AI, machine learning, data lakes, hybrid cloud/on-premises, and more.
This diagram illustrates the different layers of an internal developer platform:
Most solutions struggle to keep up with the requirements of each layer. Many of the alternative solutions can’t handle the scale of resources you need to manage, find it difficult to tie infrastructure automation directly into your core business, have leaky secrets, and enforce compliance and security incompletely.
Pulumi is a platform engineering solution that enables you to build a bridge to your developers and empower them to leverage the cloud with security, scalability, repeatability, and consistency. It provides the building blocks for each of the five layers.
Developer Control Plane. Pulumi is the simplest and most intuitive way to manage cloud infrastructure because of its ability to use standard programming languages, including YAML. This removes the friction to the basic requirements of managing cloud infrastructure well. Pulumi Automation API makes it simple to code any user interface for a developer portal / CLI. Pulumi also provides private templates that integrate with developer portals like AWS Proton and Backstage.
Integration & Delivery. Pulumi Automation API can embed IaC programs directly in applications, resulting in 10x greater management of resources per engineer. Pulumi can take advantage of all existing testing frameworks supported by the selected programming language.
Monitoring & Logging. Pulumi Insights adds advanced search, analytics, and AI to any cloud infrastructure, giving unique insights into cloud usage and cost optimizations. Pulumi partners with leading observability solutions making it easy to manage monitoring and logging resources through IaC.
Security & Identity. Pulumi CrossGuard provides policy as code with auto-remediation. Pulumi ESC makes it easy to manage secrets and configurations for every environment. Access to each cloud resource and secret can be granularly controlled and audited.
Resources. Pulumi supports modern cloud architectures such as Kubernetes, containers, serverless, generative AI, machine learning, data lakes, hybrid cloud/on-premises, and more. Pulumi makes it simple to create components that abstract away the complexity of managing thousands of resources across hundreds of distinct clouds.
Pulumi is purpose built to make all aspects of platform engineering vastly simpler.
Why Pulumi for AI Workloads?
Your company may be using AI to increase innovation and reduce costs. AI gives them the ability to design richer and more intuitive interfaces for their products and/or services to connect better with their customers. The hardest part of AI is at times not the AI pieces but the cloud infrastructure parts: how to provision and manage the infrastructure that AI workloads run on (e.g., compute and networking) and depend on (e.g., databases and storage).
There are many layers to building and managing AI applications: model training, data pipelines, backend services, frontend applications.
Pulumi provides an abstraction across all the different layers of the AI stack (web framework, LLM, containers, databases, secrets, policies, configurations, etc) as a simple Python library. Through this abstraction you can manage stacks of AI infrastructure as code.
Pulumi makes it trivial to take local AI development to production in the cloud.
Why is Pulumi better than the alternatives?
There are many different tools you can use to manage infrastructure. However, Pulumi provides you with a more productive authoring experience and more powerful automations that will allow you to ship faster and manage the infinite scale of cloud infrastructure. Read on for how Pulumi compares to specific options: clickops, Terraform, CDK, and IDP services.
Why Pulumi vs. clickops?
Manually provisioning and managing infrastructure for production via the cloud console (i.e., clickops) is a bad idea. There isn’t repeatability or consistency which leads to errors, and that can lead to downtime or worse, security breaches. That is why infrastructure as code was invented as a way to have a single source of truth for all infrastructure with changes 100% automated.
If you don’t believe this, just ask any cloud or devops subreddit, Slack group, or Discord server.
Why Pulumi vs. Terraform?
Pulumi and Terraform are both infrastructure as code (IaC) platforms, however they have fundamental differences in how they approach your needs of infrastructure management. First, here are the similarities.
Both Pulumi and Terraform include the ability to create, deploy, and manage infrastructure as code on any cloud. Both Terraform and Pulumi follow a desired state infrastructure as code model, where the IaC code represents the desired state of the infrastructure. The deployment engine compares this desired state with the current state of the stack and determines the necessary actions, such as creating, updating, or deleting resources. Both Terraform and Pulumi support many cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, plus other services like CloudFlare, Digital Ocean, and more.
However, beyond the basics of infrastructure as code there are significant differences that affect productivity, scalability, and collaboration.
Increased Productivity. As discussed at the beginning, Pulumi’s promise is to build in all the latest advancements in both the developer and operations experience. When you write Pulumi code, you now have AI copilots that can pair program with you, IDEs that have autocompletion and Intellisense squiggles, powerful libraries of low level and abstract functions, testing frameworks, code review tools, automated release controls via CICD pipelines, and great software packaging tools. When it comes to managing infrastructure with Pulumi, you also have Pulumi Copilot which combines the best generative AI models available in the industry today with access to your data and actions within Pulumi Cloud. Pulumi Copilot incorporates the context of where you are in the Pulumi Cloud console to easily answer questions about “this stack” or “the latest update” as well as automating cloud tasks. Terraform, on the other hand, has built a proprietary ecosystem that doesn’t tap into the latest advancements of how code is written or how infrastructure is managed.
Greater Scalability. Pulumi embraces software engineering as a way to solve and manage the exponentially increasing complexity of modern architectures. Programming languages with their loops, conditional logic, class inheritance, object orientedness allows engineers to design more complex and sophisticated infrastructure compared to using HCL. Pulumi also allows you to build custom workflows atop infrastructure programs, giving rise to event-driven automations or internal developer portals that provide self-service.
Better Collaboration. Pulumi makes it easy to prototype new products and quickly ship them into production because it is easier for the platform, development, and security teams to collaborate. You (platform engineering and devops teams) can define and manage common infrastructure across the company, work with the security teams to set security and compliance guardrails, and enable easy self-service of infrastructure whether through custom developer platforms or shared infrastructure libraries. To define common company-wide components, if you don’t want to program can use use YAML; if you do, you can use Python, TypeScript, Golang, C#, etc. These components can be consumed by the development team in their own IaC program in any programming language with the development tools they already know. It's easy to start with YAML and move to other languages when more power is desired. With Terraform, you must understand and use HCL. It is difficult to build self-service infrastructure platforms because it lacks the programmability and ability to apply software engineering. It's just harder to bring together platform, development, and security teams and empower them with tools that work. Whereas Pulumi unblocks infrastructure as the bottleneck for software delivery.
Why Pulumi vs. AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)?
Pulumi and CDK are similar in that both allow you to use programming languages to write infrastructure as code. However, there are some key differences:
No Vendor Lock-In. CDK supports only AWS, whereas Pulumi supports over 150 cloud and SaaS providers, with more being added all the time. CDK depends on CloudFormation as the deployment engine; it shares many of the same benefits and limitations as CloudFormation (see Pulumi vs. CloudFormation)
Execution > Translation. Pulumi and CDK support similar programming languages but differ fundamentally in their deployment approaches. Pulumi's engine directly understands these languages and communicates with cloud providers. In contrast, CDK transpiles code into AWS Cloud Assembly, an intermediate format consisting of CloudFormation templates and other assets, before deployment via CloudFormation. This difference impacts your development speed and correctness. CDK's approach can lead to slower deployments and delayed error discovery, potentially hours into the process since the errors aren’t caught during compile time. Additionally, you need expertise in both CloudFormation and CDK for effective debugging and successful deployments, whereas Pulumi's direct approach simplifies this process.
Versatility. CDK and Pulumi both support automated testing, but Pulumi offers more versatile options. While both allow unit testing, Pulumi's deep integration between language and runtime enables fast, offline tests (in-memory) with mocked cloud provider calls. In contrast, CDK only permits assertions against synthesized CloudFormation templates and lacks offline testing capabilities. This makes Pulumi's testing approach more comprehensive and flexible than CDK's.
Why Pulumi vs. 3rd party internal developer portal providers?
There are many third party providers of internal developer portals (think Port, Cortex, Backstage). Some are services and others are open source software. These providers are similar in that they offer simple developer portals that are a single part of a greater infrastructure management platform.
As discussed earlier, internal developer platforms have five layers: developer control plane, integration & delivery, monitoring & logging, resources management, and security & identity. Most of these providers offer easy to use GUI consoles, simple CICD integrations, comprehensive suite of monitoring & logging, and some form of role-based access controls. However, they lack the infrastructure as code fundamentals and automation capabilities that Pulumi has, which enable you to build powerful customizations through software engineering. Many of these solutions also lack strong secrets management and policy enforcement capabilities that are critical for production and enterprise deployments.
That said, if you need an off the shelf solution, then one of these services or software might be a good choice for you. Some of these solutions can integrate with Pulumi, and if your needs become more complex, you can always switch to Pulumi later.
How can I switch to Pulumi?
Switching to Pulumi doesn’t have to be intimidating. We’ve done this with thousands of customers before, and we can guide you through it.
We provide self-service conversion tools that allow you to Import infrastructure no matter how it was provisioned, click-ops included. You can also use tools to convert your HashiCorp Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, or Kubernetes YAML.
If you need help, we have a team of cloud experts who can answer your questions, give you a demo, or roll up their sleeves to get your migration done.
We have done lots of migrations from all types of infrastructure as code tools, and we are happy to help you think through how to make switching to Pulumi as easy as possible.
Switch to PulumiMeta image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
