this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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So I'm a Platform Engineer who is currently working mostly on Dockerfiles, Ansible Playbooks and Kubernetes YAMLs (FUCK HELM AND YAML TEMPLATING).

Wanted to know if it's worth it to invest in learning Pulumi, and advocating for its use in our company? As far as I've found out we can unify all of our IaC codes by using Pulumi and get rid of multiple tooling/languages that we currently use + writing tests for our IaC code hopefully. which we do not as of now.

What is Lemmy's opinion about Pulumi? Is it a shiny new thing that I'm getting hopelessly hyped about because of our current problems, or is it a legit thing that delivers substantial improvements to our flow?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Haven't used it myself, but every person I know that tried Pulumi ended up going back to Terraform. From what I'm given to understand it is fine for small projects, but runs into problems at scale.

Personally I don't like the default SaaS/account required model in Pulumi. I have lots of things to dislike about Terraform, but that isn't one.

Mind you too with either tool you (or your devs) will still deal with Dockerfiles and Kubernetes manifests, you just would use Pulumi or Terraform or whatever to manage them.

Lastly: I have done the jump from Ansible to Terraform myself. If you have a large amount of machines to manage and want to minimize transition pains then don't just use vanilla Terraform, but instead go for a platform like env0 or Spacelift, or at least use Terragrunt to manage your plans.

[–] no_name_dev_from_hell 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We're completely self hosted. Even our k8s cluster is provisioned by us on the baremetal servers we have rented from a third party vendor. So we cannot rely on tools that are not transparently free, seeing pulumis SaaS model is a great downside that I was not paying attention to before you pointing it out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It's not mandatory to use pulumi cloud, you can selfhost, or use any object storage backend.

https://www.pulumi.com/docs/concepts/state/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

You will never find a tool to manage everything. It's better to understand the pro and cons of each. The ability to use a real programming language is really the game changer of these new IaC tools (cdk / pulumi). You get a lot more momentum to involve others (devs) and share knowledges. If you don't find value in that, you have no reason to switch, you will lose the terraform massive ecosystem.

For me, it give me the real opportunity to progress on my coding skills in association with my ops/infra routine. It's a lot more fun than any hcl.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I was also curious about it a few years ago but I never used it in the end, not even to see what it's like.
But I'm afraid this community you posted on is pretty much dead so I wouldn't expect many answers :/