For years, Terraform dominated the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) landscape. However, its reliance on HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) forced developers to learn a proprietary, domain-specific language that lacked native for loops, proper object-oriented classes, and unit testing frameworks. Pulumi fixes this by bringing the full power of software engineering to infrastructure.
In Episode 7, we built a reusable TypeScript ComponentResource. But what if the Data Science team wants to use your component in their Python IaC? Historically, they couldn’t. Pulumi Multi-Language Components (MLC) solves this by using gRPC to project your TypeScript code across all supported languages.
In Terraform, enforcing security rules requires external tools like OPA (Open Policy Agent) and Rego. Pulumi provides a native Policy-as-Code engine called CrossGuard. In this episode, we will write TypeScript policies that act as a strict firewall, preventing developers from provisioning insecure infrastructure.
Testing infrastructure usually means deploying it to a sandbox, waiting 15 minutes, running a bash script to ping an IP, and tearing it down. Because Pulumi is TypeScript, we can use the industry-standard Jest testing framework to write offline, millisecond unit tests to validate our infrastructure logic before we ever touch the cloud.
What happens when you need to provision a resource in a system that doesn’t have an official Pulumi plugin? In Terraform, you must write complex Go code, compile a binary, and distribute it. In Pulumi, you can author a Dynamic Provider directly in your index.ts file using pure TypeScript.
Running pulumi up from a CLI is great for Platform Engineers, but what if you want to build a self-service Internal Developer Portal (IDP) where developers click a button on a web page to provision a database? The Pulumi Automation API allows you to embed the entire Pulumi Engine inside your own Node.js, Python, or Go applications.
Did you know that the @pulumi/aws package you have been using is actually built on top of Terraform? In this final intermediate episode, we explore the difference between ‘Bridged’ providers and ‘Native’ providers, and learn how @pulumi/aws-native directly communicates with the AWS Cloud Control API.
Platform Engineering is rarely confined to a single cloud. You often need to provision AWS servers, configure GitHub repositories, and set up DataDog dashboards simultaneously. In this episode, we learn how to leverage the Pulumi Registry to install third-party Providers and orchestrate multi-cloud deployments from a single TypeScript file.
Deploying your entire infrastructure (Networking, Databases, Kubernetes, and Frontend) in a single Pulumi stack is dangerous. A tiny typo in an S3 bucket configuration could accidentally trigger the destruction of your VPC. In this episode, we learn how to architect Micro-Stacks and stitch them together using StackReference.
Terraform relies on Modules for abstraction, which are essentially isolated directories of HCL files. Pulumi takes a much more elegant approach. Because we are using a real programming language, we can abstract complex architectures into reusable TypeScript Classes called ComponentResources.
Welcome to the Intermediate Tier. The true advantage of using a general-purpose programming language for IaC is access to native control flow. In this episode, we will dynamically generate Subnets and Security Group rules using native array mapping and conditional logic based on environment flags.
