It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.<p>I did try Pulumi a while back, but the compatibility with Terraform modules was not great, so I've switched to CDKTF, which can handle unmodified modules. Dunno if I'll switch back to Pulumi or just use OpenTofu directly.
> It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.<p>All their branding does this now, including the HashiCorp logo on their website [0]. There's gotta be a name for this specific branding pattern, but I don't know it.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/products/terraform" rel="nofollow">https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/products/terraform</a>
I was recently working for a company which got acquired by IBM and we had to do it too. It’s an IBM thing. I bet most people at HashiCorp hate it, at least that was the case for us.
I have absolutely nothing good to say about Pulumi. Stay far, <i>far</i> away.
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.
Their stack builds a lot of abstractions on top of each other and this works only well as long as you don't deviate from the beaten path.<p>One example:<p>You can't really build custom TS providers for AWS resources.<p>Why?<p>Because this feature is built using the compilation magic that makes inline lambdas work.<p>But the compilation step omits the AWS SDKs since these are present in a lambda anyways. So you can't use the AWS SDK in custom providers.
For me, the ideal is each team owns its own config/lifecycle mgmt, and does it in the language they wrote the rest of the system in.
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 <a href="https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/</a> 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.<p>Probably some specifics might be more useful there...
please expand on this, I am interested (for real!)
We use OpenTofu it’s pretty seamless
Does it do ephemeral values yet?
Yep, as of yesterday’s 1.11 release it’s supported!<p>That also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0.<p>[0]: <a href="https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-11-0/" rel="nofollow">https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-11-0/</a><p>Disclaimer: affiliated with the project
How do you migrate from count/for_each to `enabled` ?
Damn, might finally be able to use it. The lack of ephemeral values was a major blocker.
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 was thinking the same thing about the "an IBM company". My guess is that it's a lazy find/replace.
They should have renamed it first to HashiCorp, an IBM Company CDK, then shut it down
> It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.<p>Or it's legal trying to preempt a risk.<p>If it was the author just wanting to point at IBM, they'd mention it just once or twice, but using that awkward phrase throughout the text makes me think it was an edit mandated by a careful lawyer.
It’s how Red Hat identifies themselves too
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 <i>any</i> 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.
"Hashicorp, an IBM company"<p>Common sense would be IBM mandating that branding, as opposed to Hashicorp.
This is particularly frustrating as I've spent the last year writing many thousands of lines of CDKTF Python.<p>HCL just does not have the modularity and expressiveness that Python, or other languages CDKTF supports.<p>I guess I'll spend another year migrating to Pulumi now..
"Will be sunset on Dec 10"... commit date: Dec 10.<p>That seems like rather short notice.
Sad to see it go. The philosophy of CDK has been to offer a shared ecosystem between IaC, backend code and frontend code, allowing to share configuration, data structures and libraries between all of them. It has made development more unified and have less redundancy and manual work. Personally I don't want to repeat some stuff in a special Terraform language, if I can find a way to manage the whole application in TypeScript.
Rug pulls on infrastructure components seem even worse than other rug pulls as they can hit your entire infra codebase at once
Damn, what are the best alternatives here? For pure AWS I guess CDK directly is okay, but locks you in.
> but locks you in<p>Not picking on you personally but having had this conversation many times over many years with many clients I find it confounding. Oftentimes TF itself was heavily promoted as a way of "avoiding lock in".<p>Well guess what? Now you're locked-in to IBM, whose motivations may not be perfectly aligned to you goals of simply and efficiently using your cloud provider of choice to deliver your business outcomes.<p>What we refer to as lock-in is simply an expression of risk, with one axis being the cost of getting off $solution and the other being the likelihood of needing to do so. Having stepped through this exercise a few times, the cost of rewriting your e.g. AWS API Gateway + Lambda + SQS + RDS + CloudWatch etc architecture invariably vastly dwarfed the cost of changing the IaC language it is expressed in.<p>Anytime you feel the urge to overbuild on a cloud provider's services, stop, and do a really rigorous cost/benefit analysis. If you truly have unique drivers the data should tell the story.
I went with CDK, I'm locked into AWS already and it means my major dependency for IaC is my cloud vendor and not a third party.<p>If I really need to migrate off of AWS at some point I'll throw an LLM at it.
IaaC code is one of those use cases just throwing LLM is painful for a refactor.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I have used ChatGPT to generate perfect IaaC using the CDK and Terraform. I give it my labelled descriptive design diagram that I have to do anyway.<p>I am very detailed about all of the security group requirements, tell it that I don’t need Internet access and tell it which VPC endpoints. I don’t do “agentic coding”.
I had Gemini ingest our huge aws cloudformation repo . I had it describe each infrastructure component and how it related to others and creation hierarchy and IAM.<p>I got a nice and comprehensive infrastructure requirement document out of this.<p>Now I am using it to create Terraform repo , deploying it via OpenTofu and comparing it to my existing AWS cloud formation . This part is still a WIP .
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.<p>Besides, actual full-scale Cloud migrations are exceedingly rare.
Terraform is not an abstraction on top of multiple cloud providers, you work with aws, azure etc explicitly. It is , however, agnostic in the sense that you can provision aws, azure, gcp, etc resources within the same iac project
I always hated this meme. Using Terraform no more makes you “cloud agnostic” than using Python to script AWS services and calling boto3 than using bash and calling the AWS CLI.
AWS's native tooling is Cloudformation, and CDK is actually just a wrapper around that that generates cloudformation code (as CDKTF is a wrapper for terraform). And I like to avoid cloudformation as much as possible.
writing HCL is so much more enjoyable than writing CF, even if HCL is fairly verbose (hey, it's not as bad as XML!). CF feels like a series of PM requirements dutifully codified with no dogfooding whereas HCL/TF feels like a tool that was developed by people who actually wanted to use it.
I made <a href="https://github.com/andrewbaxter/terrars" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andrewbaxter/terrars</a> ! It's great! You get more benefits if you're in a Rust project (obviously) but it has some things that make it a good alternative anywhere:<p>- More accurate types/type safety than the CDK (for static feedback on required parameters, etc)<p>- No CLI required - just plain Rust (provider definitions can be published as normal rust packages so you don't have to generate them yourselves, and I've published a bunch of common ones - docker, aws, etc)<p>- Simpler: Terraform CDK had this crazy flow where it (go code) generated typescript code then used some transpiler to generate target language code. The output wasn't pretty, and there were bugs. Your project directory would get filled with boilerplate generated files.<p>It generates tf json files and has a fairly safe way for handling variable interpolation and escapes - I haven't hit any weird bugs with it.
Hm, we have a few very repetitive terraform projects to setup structured infrastructure clusters. For those, we just use ansible with a bunch of templating to generate a configurable, HCL-based terraform module and version that.<p>It's a bit of an "Caveman solve problem with rock" approach, but for very regular projects it's great. A new cluster is some group vars, larger changes to the structures can be easily reviewed - and if you really really have to, you can also just modify the generated code by hand to fix something your generation code can't deal with right now.
Just use Terraform?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
The value for TFCDK was Developers don't have to learn another language, they can just continue to use existing language they already know.<p>Downsides are doing infrastructure in a programming language was always problematic unless developer was skilled at Ops which most who used TFCDK were not.
I ought to have phrased it I guess as "I don't agree with the value proposition", mainly because of the downside you point out. This seems superior to Pulumi, though, in that the abstraction is (was) at least owned by Hashicorp so there was less likelihood of it falling out of date and giving you footguns.
That might have been the promise but never the real value. As you say in practice the engineer needs to know ops & terraform along side their language of choice.<p>The real value of cdktf was more dynamic infrastructure provisioning while still having the plan / apply pattern.
Probably Pulumi
If you want maximal complexity use Crossplane. :P
Normal Terraform, Pulumi or OpenTofu
Terranix? ;-)
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
At least they gave us some notice, that’s much appreciated.
Hashicorp, an IBM company
This is a bummer. I don't particularly like Pulumi but use it anyways because for my use cases being able to write actual code is really impactful. Sucks to see fewer options in that space
The often excluded option is dynamically generating JSON and feeding that to TF instead of HCL.<p>You can combine it with tools like Dhall or my personal preference Jsonnet instead of imperative languages for an interesting experience for reusable pieces outside of module concepts.
[Pulumi founder here] Sorry to hear you don't particularly like Pulumi---any/all feedback welcome. If nothing else, we do listen and we do try to get better. -Joe
What is it that you don't like about Pulumi? As I mentioned in another comment, my team of backend-engineers who took over an infra team went from Cloudformation -> CDK -> Terraform -> Pulumi and honestly find it the most approachable for other engineers familiar with normal programming languages (sorry HCL). We've been using it since 2021 and have a "what's on main is what's deployed" philosophy and adopted a RunAtlantis inspired workflow where previews are run as status checks on PRs and require explicit approvals, apply is run on merge to main and periodically, and drift checks run preview+refresh and alerts if what's checked in doesn't match what exists. We don't really use stacks, we just use a separate project for everything and write code to encapsulate modules (and luckily we can easily write unit tests and runtime assertions).
As far as corporate mercy killings goes archived under mozilla license is better than a pivot to "you now pay per core" or whatever
This is so sad. It’s a great project. Needs to be forked and maintained. If anyone forks please email me I’ll contribute.
As an alternative is anyone considering <a href="https://sst.dev/">https://sst.dev/</a> (which uses Pulumi under the hood)? We use it at work and I’ve been quite happy with it
It would be great to have an alternative to Terraform that uses a bit more advanced provider (at last for AWS). Does OpenTofu use that same provider?
The providers for tofu are by design the same as for terraform.<p>Also, for large providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc - these are often largely authored by the hyperscaler themselves, for better or worse.
It does. What are you looking for in a more advanced AWS provider?
we're using cdk since 100% of our stuff is in aws but will soon need to hook up some external resources like cloudflare. looked at tfcdk a while back but didn't think it was a good idea (glad). still trying to figure out a good way forward and hoping it's not to rip the bandaid and migrate everything to terraform / pulumi
That’s a real shame. It seems like Pulumi is the only alternative for internal DSLs for IaaC? I always found HCL to be quite terrible, slowly becoming less painful, but not really refactoring-friendly.<p>Terraform CDK had promise as a blessed infrastructure-as-actual-code solution from the official maintainer of Terraform, so easier to sell internally rather than something from a new vendor like Pulumi. I feel sorry for those teams who have migrated to TF CDK.<p>Internal vs external DSLs explained in the middle of this page: <a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DslQandA.html" rel="nofollow">https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DslQandA.html</a>
CDKTF works beautifully, all the complains here seem to be from salty devops who got pissed the developers wanted something more powerful than the garbage HCL with its even more garbage module system.<p>CDKTF stacks are great and the construct pattern gives you modularization without all the baggage.
Not stated in the most diplomatic way, but I do agree. Having used CDK (not cdktf) and now being forced back to Terraform feels like going back to the stone age. It is absolutely obvious to me that generating infrastructure definitions from a regular, testable language using all the same tools, techniques and distribution mechanisms that you use for all your other software development is the superior way. Being able to piggyback off of the vast ecosystem of Terraform providers was a really clever move, although I understand it led to some rough edges.
I kind of like it but I always found it kind of clunky how it's ultimately just generating JSON/HCL anyway. For instance, you can't data source then use code to transform and send it to a resource since it has to transpile first.<p>That also means you end up with things like the language's native JSON not doing what you expect and having to use a special Terraform function call.
Well that sucks for me.
Good move. They clearly didn't have the resources they needed. The design of the CDKs was atrocious.
What was the point of it? Terraform supports AWS anyway.