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Pulumi vs. Terraform: Choosing your IaC Tool
Similarities and differences
Selecting the appropriate cloud engineering platform is crucial. Although there are numerous solutions available that implement IaC, this article will concentrate on two remarkable IaC tools: Pulumi and Terraform. Evaluating these tools in terms of features, ease of use, and community support is essential in determining which IaC tool is best suited to meet your requirements.
Pulumi and Terraform are both Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. Terraform, popular but older tool with vast platform support and documentation, is developed by Hashicorp. And Pulumi, newer, developer-friendly tool that’s also fast-growing, is developed by a startup of the same name.
If you have coding experience but are new to infrastructure as code tools you might find Pulumi easier or more interesting to get started with since it supports Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, C#, F#, Java and YAML. On the contrary, Terraform supports HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and JSON, but it is highly recommended to use HCL as it’s explicitly designed for Terraform. One of the benefits of HCL is that it’s human readable and easy to learn if you’re not familiar with other programming languages but, since HCL is not widely used it’s more difficult to find community support.
