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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

You‘re pretty much describing the idea behind Pulumi which got a lot of traction lately.

Personally, I‘m still undecided on whether the unlimited freedom of a fully fledged programming language is a good or a bad idea in terms of footgun potential.

I‘m also still a bit unsure whether to play early adopter for an extremely hyped VC open core project even though it feels tempting.

Experiences appreciated!

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Pulumi sounds interesting. Spent 10 mins with their marketing website and I'm not very clear whether it is a standalone set of libraries, or do they only work in conjunction with their cloud services. Do you know?

You can use it standalone and manage the state yourself.

Looks like they actually might have added locking recently with https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/pull/2697 but I haven't looked deeply

I've been using Pulumi for a new project after using Terraform for a long time. It's a little weird at first, but then it clicks and actually feels quite nice. The Input/Output logic with its async behavior is the weird part, but it works fine when you understand how it works.

The only (minor) problem that I've seen in it is that the JavaScript/TypeScript support seems more mature and featureful than the other backends. So, I'll simply use that.

My experience is that it was definitely a foot gun.

There are too many ways to write fancy abstractions that are unreadable or not extensible, for example.

What is a foot-gun? Ansible/Terraform, or the library approach that I'm describing?

If I was doing things from the ground up, I'd pulumi it, I believe.

Terraform is, however, optimized for everyone under the bell curve.

You also have terraform cdk, which is currently in beta.

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