Pulumi Cloud

My main use case for Pulumi Enterprise is infrastructure as code, provisioning resources on Azure. For provisioning resources on Azure, it is heavily used for creating Kubernetes clusters, using for example a CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps.

The main reason for adopting Pulumi Enterprise regarding the infrastructure-as-code part is the ability to use the .NET language. Since our products were developed in .NET, we understood that it would be interesting to have an infrastructure-as-code tool that could be used with the same language we already had knowledge of.

I believe that the best features Pulumi Enterprise offers us are the stacks, which allowed us to separate the development, staging, and production environments, and to have a YAML configuration file where we defined the different tiers per environment. Additionally, the built-in secret management was invaluable. We were able to create Pulumi secrets without needing to use an external provider, a Key Vault, or HashiCorp Vault.

Regarding the environment separation and the built-in secrets management, these features had a positive impact on my day-to-day work and the security of operations. With separation by stacks, we did not need to keep duplicating code. We used the same code for all environments, but changed the particulars related to compute power size, number of replicas in a given cluster, etc. As for secrets, it made things much easier because we did not need to point to a source or an external vault. This also helped a lot from a security standpoint because we did not need to have the password hardcoded.

Pulumi Enterprise has had a positive impact on my organization in terms of agility, standardization, and governance in the infrastructure-as-code area.

Regarding how these improvements in agility, standardization, and governance showed up in practice within my team, we were able to maintain a standardized structure for multiple resources. If I were to do it manually, I would probably have many resources in different forms, done by different people. When we use infrastructure as code, we can have code that is easily replicated and distributed for the creation of multiple resources while maintaining the standard. There is also the governance part because we can organize who is creating the resources. We have a code repository in Git, so we can track who made the change, who made the pull request, and at what time the pipeline ran. Additionally, there is agility in the process. In a use case where we had to create, for example, 200 computers or 200 virtual machines, if I had to do that 200 times manually, it would take much longer. Using a for loop, for example, we did this in a few minutes.

I see Pulumi Enterprise as a very complete tool. I worked with Terraform, which I believe is Pulumi Enterprise's main competitor, and I do not see many things that Pulumi Enterprise could improve, at least based on what I used. What I missed was integration with other tools. For example, Infracost, which is a tool for cost analysis in the pipeline, only worked with Terraform at the time. I missed having that integration, but that is more because of Infracost than because of Pulumi Enterprise. Additionally, I think the modules part is a bit weak. Terraform's module system is better and much better defined.

I used Pulumi Enterprise for about 5 years.

Pulumi Enterprise has been stable in my experience.

Pulumi Enterprise has high scalability.

I had no need to contact customer support for Pulumi Enterprise.

I did not use a different solution for infrastructure as code. Pulumi Enterprise was the first tool.

Pulumi Enterprise's pricing, setup costs, and licensing are not high. There is a cost, but there is also the open-source option which works very well.

Before choosing Pulumi Enterprise, I evaluated Terraform as another option.

The advice I would give to others who are thinking about using Pulumi Enterprise is to use it if you have development knowledge in some language that Pulumi Enterprise supports, because it is very interesting when you already have a development stack. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.

We use Pulumi Enterprise with the Python runtime to provision our Azure platform. The client was using Azure platform to create or manage the resources. We started providing them solutions with Pulumi Enterprise and it worked very well because it was managing the managed identities, the DB containers, and the Key Vault access, event hub, and all kinds of these layers. This was incorporated in Pulumi Enterprise. This was our main case for provisioning the infrastructure for our client with the help of Pulumi Enterprise.

Pulumi Enterprise has allowed us to be more confident in the code changes because we have many teams. For example, for development, we have a couple of teams who are working on the development applications, and then there are a couple of teams who are working continuously on the production instances. Pulumi Enterprise has helped us in the code changes that we are actually deploying and releasing. We are doing unit testing with the help of Pulumi Enterprise's infrastructure as part of the pipeline because it helped to add the Azure DevOps pipeline and it worked for the part of the CI pipeline and then we did the CD, the configuration or the continuous deployment with the help of it.

As soon as we see the changes are integrating into the pipeline and it is getting deployed and we get the GUI, proper GUI where we can simply differentiate what is actually applying or what is actually deleting from our infrastructure. This has helped significantly.

The best feature that Pulumi Enterprise offers is the deployment, running, creating the stack, managing all those stacks. For example, for development, we have an individual stack for development. For QA, we have another stack. And for production, for non-prod, for other stacks also, they have independent stacks that are totally independent on their own. Nothing is dependent on any other stack. As soon as we are deploying any changes on the development, it is going to be deployed on the development only.

The deployment checks stand out the most valuable for me because it allows me to debug my environment. For example, if I run any change in the production environment, it will give me a URL which will show a preview of what is the difference we are going to apply on our current infrastructure and what was earlier. I can share that URL with my peers, with my colleagues, and they can also see what is actually going to happen with this change. That is the most valuable thing I have personally perceived, and my other team members also feel it is a very important feature of this.

For improvement, I feel there can be other things. Sometimes I feel that the state and the stacks get large eventually and sometimes they give the output in a very long format and it is difficult to really understand what is happening on it. I feel that it can be improved by Pulumi to manage those long and large stacks.

I think the cost was very high when I had discussions with the customers. They felt that Terraform has less capability, but it is not that costly compared to Pulumi Enterprise. If the cost can be a little reduced, I think it is going to capture most of the market.

I have used Pulumi Enterprise for one of my customers, and it was used only for five to six months. I have utilized my expertise for Pulumi Enterprise for six months.

Pulumi Enterprise is very stable.

We are using the enterprise version, so it is very scalable. Many users in our company are using it and they have not faced any scalability issues till now.

We were using Terraform, Terraform Cloud to provision all the infrastructure, but it has some limitations. Pulumi Enterprise has provided many other features which allowed our customer to change their decision to come and start using Pulumi instead of Terraform.

We were using Terraform, Terraform Cloud. There were many reasons for switching from Terraform to Pulumi. First of all, the licensing. Earlier the Terraform Cloud license was almost free, and after HashiCorp sold it to IBM, it became costly and it is not still confirmed on the licensing thing from Terraform Cloud. The second thing is that Terraform uses its own language, HCL, HashiCorp configuration language, which does not allow us to use any programming skills such as for loops or if/else statements and other languages. Pulumi is providing six languages to use and set up the infra with. These are the main features that Pulumi has also, which allows us to switch from Terraform to Pulumi.

The setup is very easy. I would say one of the main features I think I forgot to add in my initial questions. The setup to use Pulumi Enterprise is very flawless and easy to use for any layman guy. If I give it to configure and start using Pulumi Enterprise to an intern, he will start using it in five minutes. The setup to use Pulumi Enterprise is very easy.

I would think the return on investment is that earlier only the infra guys were using any tool to deploy the infra, but in my team, I can see the development team is also encouraged and happy to use Pulumi Enterprise to configure the resources on Azure cloud because they have the programming skills and Pulumi Enterprise is providing features in their tool. I have seen the development team and the testing team who feel or want to do cross-team work, and they are very encouraged and happy to start using Pulumi Enterprise. I think that is how I can say time is being saved, and people are getting encouraged to use any infra tool to configure their infra as per their requirement. That is my experience with me and the other team members and that is what I feel as a return on investment on Pulumi Enterprise.

The pricing I would have already confirmed is high for enterprise; otherwise, it is available free of cost also. The enterprise version is a little bit high, and the licensing and setup are totally okay and we are very happy to use them. The setup is very easy.

If you have a complex infrastructure, start using Pulumi Enterprise. If you have a very small team to use any of these infra IAC tools, then use Terraform Cloud. Otherwise, if you have a complex infrastructure or a big team, start using Pulumi Enterprise without any second thought. It is going to give you a very good return on investment, and you will feel very happy after using it. My overall review rating is not available.

Pulumi Enterprise is way better than Terraform in my opinion because it has a declarative syntax that Terraform does not have, which is really valuable.

This shift to everything as code has led to measurable changes such as faster deployments. Deployments are faster because we already have everything in one place, so we know where to change things. The main benefit is the history: we know everything that changed and we can track everything.

Reusable components and infrastructure testing in a real language have helped my team a lot because we can test things before shipping it and before making changes, which is really useful. If something is going to break, we know in advance.