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Packer

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Packer vs Pulumi: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Packer and Pulumi

Packer and Pulumi are two popular DevOps tools used for infrastructure provisioning and management. While both tools can be used to automate infrastructure deployment, they have distinct differences. Here are the key differences between Packer and Pulumi:

  1. Functionality and Purpose: Packer is primarily used for creating machine images across multiple platforms, such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Docker. It focuses on building immutable infrastructure. On the other hand, Pulumi is a multi-language infrastructure as code platform that allows you to define, deploy, and manage cloud infrastructure using popular programming languages like TypeScript, Python, and Go.

  2. Language Support: Packer has its own configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which is used to describe infrastructure configurations as code. Pulumi, on the other hand, supports multiple programming languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, and .NET, giving you the flexibility to choose a language you are comfortable with.

  3. Declarative vs Imperative: Packer follows a more declarative approach, where you define the desired state of the infrastructure and Packer takes care of building the machine image accordingly. Pulumi, on the other hand, allows you to use imperative code to define and manage your infrastructure, giving you more control and flexibility in the provisioning process.

  4. Scope of Provisioning: Packer focuses on the creation of machine images and doesn't provide native support for continuous deployment or managing infrastructure resources. Pulumi, on the other hand, allows for provisioning and managing a wide range of cloud resources, including virtual machines, databases, networking components, and more.

  5. Vendor Support: Packer supports a wide range of cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and VMware, making it a popular choice for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Pulumi also supports various cloud providers, but it also offers some specific components and integrations for certain cloud platforms, like the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) for easier AWS resource provisioning.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Packer has a large and mature community with extensive documentation, plugins, and integrations developed by the community. Pulumi is relatively newer but has been gaining popularity with its active community and an ecosystem of libraries and examples developed by the team and the community.

In summary, Packer focuses on building machine images across multiple platforms and follows a more declarative approach, while Pulumi is a multi-language infrastructure as code platform that allows for provisioning and managing cloud resources using imperative code. Packer has its own configuration language (HCL), while Pulumi supports multiple programming languages. Pulumi offers a wider scope of provisionable resources and has specific and deeper integrations with certain cloud platforms, while Packer supports a wide range of cloud providers. Packer has a larger and more mature community, while Pulumi is gaining popularity with its active community and expanding ecosystem.

Decisions about Packer and Pulumi

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.

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Sergey Ivanov
Overview

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.

Advantages

Terraform 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.

Disadvantages

Software 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.

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Pros of Packer
Pros of Pulumi
  • 27
    Cross platform builds
  • 9
    Vm creation automation
  • 4
    Bake in security
  • 1
    Good documentation
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 7
    Infrastructure as code with less pain
  • 4
    Best-in-class kubernetes support
  • 2
    Great CLI
  • 2
    Simple
  • 2
    Can use many languages
  • 1
    Built-in secret management
  • 1
    Can be self-hosted
  • 1
    Multi-cloud

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What is Packer?

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

What is Pulumi?

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.

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What are some alternatives to Packer and Pulumi?
Docker
The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Vagrant
Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Ansible
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.
AWS CloudFormation
You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.
See all alternatives