Are you a developer? Does life present you with difficult choices now and then? If yes, this blog will resolve one such issue for you. By the end of it, you will know whether it is Pulumi or Terraform for you. This makes me realize that there was a time when the toughest decision I had to make was choose between Spectrum Internet deals or others based on the speed and features. Easier times, I must agree.
However, choosing between Pulumi and Terraform won’t be that difficult a job for you. Let’s get to know the differences between these two Infrastructures.
What is Terraform?
A cloud development platform that allows you to describe your entire infrastructure as code apart from building resources across providers. Even if your code spans across multiple service providers, you can describe your complete code on this platform.
For example, your server might come from AWS. Whereas, you get your DNS from CloudFare. Te source of the database may be entirely different, for example, Heroku. Terraform is equipped to build resources across all the providers working in parallel.
What is Pulumi?
Pulumi is an open-source cloud development platform. It aims at making the process of creating cloud programs easy for developers. Apart from ease, this platform also ensures that you are productive. You can skip the YAML in Pulumi and jump directly to writing the code. It is a multi-language and multi-cloud platform that provides you with a buffet of packages.
Both the above-mentioned platforms fall under the category of ‘Infrastructure Build Tools’. And both of them have some differences and similarities. Here’s a comprehensive comparison for you.
Pulumi vs. Terraform – A Comparison of Features
Configuration Management
Configuration management is an easy task on both platforms. For Terraform, it happens after creating a file where you allot default values for every environment. For example, RDS instance size. You enter this value as a map. After that, you provide maps for every environment. Merging the maps will give you easy-to-use configuration management.
On the other hand, Pulumi asks you to start by creating a file. You will have to enter default values in this file for every environment. One also has to make use of a mechanism that makes it easy to read the environment-specific file. This particular file is in the YAML mode. In case, the value is not found in the YAML file, you will have to do with the default value.
Modularity
Just like configuration management, modularity is also easy for both tools. However, in my opinion, Terraform is easier than Pulumi. Terraform modules are re-usable. You can create configuration instances using the existing modules by simply injecting new values.
Pulumi, on the other hand, equips you with the power to modularize any way you please.
Consistent Resource Naming
Naming your cloud resources is essential as it can be difficult for you to find a specific resource from a pool of many. With Terraform, you can create local variables as names by adding suffixes and prefixes as well. Hence, making it easy for you to have a consistent name for every resource.
Pulumi is pretty straight forward with the naming option as well. It allows the users to make use of real programming language to give names to resources.
Consistent Resource Tagging
Terraform and Pulumi both make it easy for you to add resource tags. For Terraform, you have to add the default tags aka common environment configuration. Following this, you have to merge the default tags with the custom ones.
On the other hand, Pulumi uses the real programming language to add resource tags.
Language
Terraform’s declarative language is both a strength and a weakness for the platform. It guides the users to declarative configuration. Hence, making the code clean. However, at times, you might also have to do with clumsy conditional situations.
Pulumi, in this case, would be the winner as it makes use of programming language. Therefore, the solutions that the platform offers are also unique to the developers using it. Pulumi is better than Terraform in the sense that you do not have to deal with conditional situations.
IDE Support
Both platforms offer excellent IDE support.
Conclusion
In my opinion, both Terraform and Pulumi are considerable Infrastructure as Code platforms. Both of them offer easy to use features with Pulumi taking the lead over the language and modularity. But the difference is not huge that you ditch Terraform. So, if you use Terraform, there is no reason for you to make a shift to Pulumi and vice versa.
Both platforms share many similarities. Another one is the availability of high-speed Internet. For me, calling Spectrum phone number for a friend was the best thing that happened for my business a year ago. It fits my needs perfectly. You can subscribe to any other service that works best for you.
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