Cloud Template Transpilers
Because of the challenges of writing raw YAML/JSON by hand, several notable projects exist to compile higher-level languages into intermediate formats for deployment. Two such projects are AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), an AWS Labs project created in 2018, and CDK for Terraform (CDKTF), a HashiCorp project created in 2020 and deprecated in 2025.
Like Pulumi, these projects allow you to author infrastructure as code using general-purpose languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, and others. Unlike Pulumi, however, whose open-source engine understands these languages, a transpiler (a.k.a., source-to-source compiler), translates this code into an intermediate format — e.g., AWS CloudFormation YAML for CDK, or Terraform JSON for CDKTF. The resulting files and related assets are then submitted to their respective deployment engines to provision infrastructure.
To learn more about how Pulumi compares to some of these services in detail, see the following comparison docs:
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