It’s endorsed branding. Basically when a parent company “endorses” its subsidiaries’ brands, but keep their own name (as opposed to renaming everything to IBM, like eg Google would do).

Metastatized branding

Makes IBM look really bad. Do they also force people to bow when the CEO of IBM enters the room, and address them as sir or your highness?

My experience with Pulumi is you can write bad pulumi code and good pulumi code and just like everything else, it's easy to end up in a codebase where one poor soul was tasked with writing it all and they didn't do the best job with it.

Please expand on your experiences, because I've had great luck with Pulumi at my company since October 2021. No engineer liked HCL, our demographic was engineers who were familiar with programming languages who wanted to self service basic infrastructure (AWS SecretsManager, IRSA roles, Databricks Service Principals, etc). We were pretty easily able to shim in a RunAtlantis inspired system that displayed previews that required explicit approval when a PR was raised, performed apply on merge to main, and ran drift checks periodically.

My experience is that by stealing providers from Terraform, they failed to properly handle statically typed languages (Go) with certain providers (HCloud); I had problems with their ID type and had to abandon my Pulumi setup.

Why? I’ve had nothing but good experiences, but I don’t run it and the team that does is extremely competent

Have a look at https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and tell me what you think. We don't have enough docs though. Tough being an open source thing that you want to keep open.

Running SST with Pulumi and it's been a great experience. Infrastructure and maintenance has been pleasant and SST's pre-fabs really make things easy to spin up resources.

Strange, I have a lot of good things to say about both it and Terraform.

Probably some specifics might be more useful there...

please expand on this, I am interested (for real!)

Does it do ephemeral values yet?

Now more will be using a combination of OpenTofu and Terraform, and there will probably be some tacit endorsement of OpenTofu by Hashicorp folks in their communication with those who are using both. Good to see!

I assume it's a matter of branding and making IBM look more modern by associating with the Hashicorp brand.

It’s one thing to say it once but 3 times in the same paragraph seems weird for sure!

It's common when corps buy large enough companies that they don't want to kill the original brand. That's why you get hotels like "(something) by Hilton".

Do you mean Red Hat identifies itself using the phrase "Red Hat, an IBM Company"? Because I don't see any use of this on redhat.com (including that website's corporate "about" content) and if any Red Hatters are using this phrasing (I'm a current Red Hat employee) I haven't been aware of it.

Being able to inherit from Ingress and add a parameter of say public=True/False and then it change annotations, middleware, etc and then being able to re-use that across 100s of stacks is very powerful. DRY is not something HCL is good at.

That's very subjective. Concepts like iterations are inevitable, and they don't look great in a declarative language like HCL.

I also find refactorings considerably harder in a declarative language, since configurations have a rigid structure.

Thanks, will definitely look into it. I first used Pulumi when it was just a cloud platform but seems it is a more general devops tool now.

And it happens while we are all very enthusiastically dedicated to migrating off Kubernetes ingress-nginx. Just as planned.

IaaC code is one of those use cases just throwing LLM is painful for a refactor.

In my experience claude/codex to wrangle CDK constructs be complicated, it frequently hallucinates constructs that simply do not exist, options that are not supported etc.

While they can generate IaaC component mostly okay and these problems can be managed, Iterations can take a lot of time, each checkpoint, goes the deploy/ rollback cycles in CF. CloudFormation is also not particularly fast, other IaaC frameworks are not that different.

Running an agent to iterate until it gets it right is just more difficult with IaaC refactor projects. Hallucinations, stuck loops and other issues, can quickly run the infra bill up not to mention security.

Exactly. It's just so much cleaner to do it in the Cloud provider's native tooling. The impedance mismatch from Cloud-agnostic abstractions always just makes thing shitty enough that in the long run you spend more time dealing with weird edge cases.

Besides, actual full-scale Cloud migrations are exceedingly rare.

The value of CDK was always that it allowed you to write in a fully orthogonal language rather than the poor pseudo-language of hcl.

When writing stacks you need normal language features: loops, yes, but also if statements, reuse (functions), being able to do stuff like complex string parsing and re-formatting, etc etc.

HCL supports loops, modules can be kind-of used as functions with lots of footguns, there are awful hacks for some other things, and some stuff just couldn't be done.

Yeah I'm struggling to see the value here.

I'll be honest Pulumi is pretty cool but I'm a little worried by how high on the stack it is. I wonder if the same thing won't happen to them that's happening to CDKTF here.

Terraform is ugly but it works well enough for me and seems ingrained enough to be durable to this kind of thing (i.e. I bet for sure the community would pick it up (I wish I could say that I'm part of that community but I can't say I use it quite that often))

Yes, the NixOS module system is so much more composable than the TF one

Not gonna lie Terranix has been working great for us, all our configuration is in Nix files anyway so it's so easy to just pass stuff in rather than using Tf variables etc

Hashicorp, an IBM company

Any particular libraries you use to generate TF-JSON from jsonnet?

I wrote a generator a little while ago that can create jsonnet libraries from the TF schemas: https://github.com/Duologic/soysonnet

Example lib here: https://github.com/Duologic/soysonnet-aws

I only needed it for AWS so I didn't spend more time on it.

OpenTofu is a fork of terraform, not CDKTF.

Although, I would hope a fork of cdktf would target opentofu instead of terraform.