Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Pulumi vs AWS Cloud Development Kit: What are the differences?
Pulumi: Open-source cloud development platform. Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages; AWS Cloud Development Kit: A framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code. It is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. It uses the familiarity and expressive power of programming languages for modeling your applications. It provides you with high-level components that preconfigure cloud resources with proven defaults, so you can build cloud applications without needing to be an expert.
Pulumi and AWS Cloud Development Kit belong to "Infrastructure Build Tools" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Pulumi are:
- Containers - Deploy a Docker container to production in 5 minutes using your favorite orchestrator.
- Serverless - Stand up a serverless API or event handler in 5 minutes using a real lambda in code.
- Infrastructure - Manage cloud infrastructure or hosted services using infrastructure as code.
On the other hand, AWS Cloud Development Kit provides the following key features:
- Easier cloud onboarding
- Faster development process
- Customizable and shareable
Pulumi is an open source tool with 6.2K GitHub stars and 325 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Pulumi's open source repository on GitHub.
Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.
We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.
Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.
AdvantagesTerraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.
Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.
Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.
DisadvantagesSoftware is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.
Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.
Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.
Pros of AWS Cloud Development Kit
Pros of Pulumi
- Infrastructure as code with less pain7
- Best-in-class kubernetes support4
- Great CLI2
- Simple2
- Can use many languages2
- Built-in secret management1
- Can be self-hosted1
- Multi-cloud1