Any opinion on Pulumi?

gouggoug 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not an opinion on Pulumi specifically, but an opinion on using imperative programming languages for infrastructure configuration: don't do it. (This includes using things like CDKTF)

Infrastructure needs to be consistent, intuitive and reproducible. Imperative languages are too unconstrained. Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable (for example, it'd be easy to write code that creates a resources based on the current time of day...).

With infrastructure, you want predictability and reproducibility. You want to focus more on writing _what_ your infra should look like, less _how_ to get there.

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nothrabannosir 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Couldn't disagree more.

I have written both TF and then CDKTF extensively (!), and I am absolutely never going back to raw TF. TF vs CDKTF isn't declarative vs imperative, it's "anemic untyped slow feedback mess" vs "strong typesystem, expressive builtins and LSP". You can build things in CDKTF that are humanly intractable in raw TF and it requires far less discipline, not more, to keep it from becoming an unmaintainable mess. Having a typechecker for your providers is a "cannot unsee" experience. As is being able to use for loops and defining functions.

That being said, would I have preferred a CDKTF in Haskell, or a typed Nix dialect? Hell yes. CDKTF was awful, it was just the least bad thing around. Just like TF itself, in a way.

But I have little problems with HCL as a compilation target. Rich ecosystem and the abstractions seem sensible. Maybe that's Stockholm syndrome? Ironically, CDKTF has made me stop hating TF :)

Now that Hashicorp put the kibosh on CDKTF though, the question is: where next...

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kstrauser 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing exactly that. I want my IaC to be roughly as Turing complete as JSOJ. It’s sooo tempting to say “if only I could write this part with a for loop…” and down that path lies madness.

There are things I think Terraform could do to improve its declarative specs without violating the spirit. Yet, I still prefer it as-is to any imperative alternatives.

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vanviegen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Particularly, they allow you to write code whose output is unpredictable

Is that an easy mistake to make and a hard one to recover from, in your experience?

The way you have to bend over backwards in Terraform just to instantiate a thing multiple times based on some data really annoys me..

	▲	gouggoug 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Is that an easy mistake to make and a hard one to recover from, in your experience? If you're alone in a codebase? Probably not. In a company with many contributors of varying degrees of competence (from your new grad to your incompetent senior staff), yes. In large repositories, without extremely diligent reviewers, it's impossible to prevent developers from creating the most convoluted anti-patterny spaghetti code, that will get copy/pasted ad nauseam across your codebase. Terraform as a tool and HCL as a programming language leave a lot to be desire (in hindsight only, because, let's be honest, it's been a boon for automation), but their constrained nature makes it easier to reign in the zealous junior developer who just discovered OOP and insists on trying it everywhere...

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popalchemist 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

yes. IaC is a misnomer. IaC implementations should have a spec (some kind of document) as the source of truth; not code.

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x3n0ph3n3 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My opinion is there are not enough good software developers doing DevOps, and HCL is simple enough and can have pretty good guardrails on it. My biggest concern is people shooting themselves in the foot because the static analysis tools available for HCL don't work with Pulumi.

	▲	SlightlyLeftPad 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s an unfortunate truth that good software developers aren’t crazy enough to want to do it.

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orthecreedence 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pulumi is superior to Terraform for my use cases. It's actually Infrastructure as Code. Terraform pretends to be, but uses a horrible config language that tries to skirt the line between programming language and config spec, and skirts it horribly. Reorganizing modules is a huge pain. I dreaded using Terraform and I spin things up and down in Pulumi all day. No contest.

Granted, I'm a programmer, have been for a long time, so using programming tools is a no brainer for me. If someone wants to manage infra but doesn't have programming skills, then learning the Terraform config language is a great idea. Just kidding, it's going to be just as confusing and obnoxious as learning the basic skills you need in python/js to get up and running with Pulumi.

	▲	kstrauser 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I disagree with that. I think it’s satisfying to find a way to express my intent in HCL, and I don’t think I could do it as well without a strong programming background.