Infrastructure as code has improved delivery speed and reduces deployment errors across teams
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Pulumi Enterprise is that our platform and DevOps engineering teams use it to support multiple application teams.
A specific example of how our platform and DevOps teams use Pulumi Enterprise is that we implemented it using Python and TypeScript to define infrastructure for one of our customers. Infrastructure code is version-controlled, tested, and structured as application code, improving readability and reuse.
Additionally, my main use case for Pulumi Enterprise includes building reusable Pulumi components for common patterns such as VPCs, IAM roles, and container platforms in our AWS cloud.
What is most valuable?
Regarding the best features Pulumi Enterprise offers, infrastructure code stands out because it is version-controlled. Stacks are organized by environment and workload, and the policy as code feature enforces security and compliance standards.
Pulumi Enterprise has had a positive impact on my organization. It is deployed as a managed SaaS platform connected to our AWS account. The SaaS deployment reduces the operational overhead on us while still enabling enterprise-grade controls.
What needs improvement?
In terms of how Pulumi Enterprise can be improved, I would say its documentation can be improved for entry-level users. More complete documentation would help new users get into the details and avoid the initial challenges one can encounter with Pulumi. The UI could be more intuitive as well.
Regarding needed improvements for Pulumi Enterprise, support is good and I am satisfied with it. I believe pricing can be made more cost-effective for us.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Pulumi Enterprise for around one to two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Regarding Pulumi Enterprise's stability, I have found it stable in our production use. Deployment, state management, and previews have consistently worked without platform-related failures. Overall, it has proven to be a stable platform.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of Pulumi Enterprise's scalability, I have found it scalable and it has served us well as the team size grew. It scales well as infrastructure complexity grows. Its stack isolation and reusable components allow us to manage many environments without conflicts. Overall, this has been a scalable and stable platform.
How are customer service and support?
Regarding Pulumi Enterprise's customer support, it has been responsive and knowledgeable when we have needed help. No issues have been observed.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have not used a different solution previously.
What was our ROI?
I can share that we have seen specific outcomes with Pulumi Enterprise; it is a premium offering but comes with a premium aligned with its capabilities. I would say the ROI is justified for teams managing complex, multi-team infrastructure environments. The ROI is faster for us as we are experiencing infrastructure delivery improvements and fewer deployment errors using Pulumi. This has helped us significantly in terms of having a reliable Infrastructure as Code tool.
We have seen a clear ROI through faster infrastructure deliveries and fewer deployment errors.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Pulumi Enterprise is that these areas can be improved. The pricing can be made lower.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Pulumi Enterprise, I evaluated Terraform Cloud, open-source Terraform, and cloud-native Infrastructure as Code tools. Pulumi stood out.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Pulumi Enterprise an 8 out of 10 overall.
I rate it an 8 because the learning curve and enterprise pricing keep it from being a perfect fit for every team. These areas can be improved, which is the reason for the two-point reduction.
For others looking into using Pulumi Enterprise, I would say it is a great choice for teams with strong software engineering practices. My advice would be to invest upfront in code structure, reusable components, and team training to fully benefit.
In terms of additional thoughts about Pulumi Enterprise, I would summarize that it is best viewed as an infrastructure engineering platform rather than just an Infrastructure as Code tool. Teams that treat infrastructure as software will get the most long-term value from it.
My overall rating for Pulumi Enterprise is 8 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Great product
What do you like best about the product?
Very easy to configure and manage. Works well in Github actions as well
What do you dislike about the product?
Documentation can be a bit daunting for new users and Pulumi AI hallucination can be a bit of a pain
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automate and manage my cloud deployments
Cool
What do you like best about the product?
Allow the TDDers to write automation tests, even IaC code can be tested!
What's more the secret as code is made possible and it's safer than SOPS. (It's harder to make mistakes than with SOPS).
What do you dislike about the product?
Cognitive load is somewhat higher than expected.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Secret as code is hard. We used SOPS before, but sometimes, we made mistakes, such as forgetting to encrypt them before pushing them to the code repo.
The Pulumi helped us prevent that and forced us always to push the secret as encrypted.
Also it's hard to TDD the IaC code, with Pulumi, it's possible!
Automation API connects Programming Languages with a Streamlined Interface for Multi-Cloud
What do you like best about the product?
- Multi Cloud Support
- Multi Language Support
- Automation API
- State Management
What do you dislike about the product?
- Recovery from erroneous states within the Automation API is not as effortless as using the CLI
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Using Cloud Automation inside of the Busines Logic of a SaaS using TypeScript
Amazing SDK. I just love it
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use and writing code. It just makes things easy to deploy
What do you dislike about the product?
Little bit technical to understand but once you do it its easy
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It makes deployment easy
A new approach for Infra-As-Code, much more closer to "as-code" than yaml oriented tools
What do you like best about the product?
Pulumi is an awesome tool to easily manage Infra-as-code with a new approach more based on code than yaml like its competitors.
Being able to use my favorite langage to manage my infrastructure is really useful.
Onboarding to Pulumi is made easy thank to the complete documentation and a large community to answer any question
What do you dislike about the product?
What is currently not yet covered at 100% is that some SDKs are not available in all supported langages.
But thanks to the great community it's improving very fast
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Implementing Infra-as-code with a real "as-code" approach based on your favorite development langage rather than using yaml files.
It's really easier for dev team to onboard and work with Pulumi to manage their infrastructure
I'm a Pulumi employee now, but I was a Pulumi user first
What do you like best about the product?
I switched to Pulumi in 2019, when I got frustrated with trying to embed any sort of logic into my Terraform configurations. I found Pulumi's approach of using a general purpose programming language made a lot more sense to me. What I like most about Pulumi is that I'm not only solving business problems through infrastructure as code, but I'm also building skill and experience in a programming language. That's transferable and reusable knowledge that adds value to my career.
What do you dislike about the product?
As someone with an infrastructure/operations background, the learning curve of using a general purpose programming language (I started with TypeScript and later switched to Golang) can be a bit challenging if you don't already know or aren't already familiar with the language. That's not Pulumi's fault; that's just the nature of learning a programming language. The Pulumi documentation needs improvement, but otherwise I haven't run into any issues or problems.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Pulumi is an infrastructure as code (IaC) solution, designed to allow users to implement IaC using a general purpose programming language. As an IaC solution, Pulumi helps automate the deployment of cloud infrastructure to support applications running on the cloud. I can write a Pulumi program to deploy cloud resources, and then easily provision and destroy those resources with a single command. My Pulumi programs are stored in version control, so I can easily test changes before committing them, or rollback to a previous configuration. Through the use of pull requests and code reviews, I can collaborate with teammates on infrastructure changes before those changes are implemented.
Pulumi offers built-in Dynamic Resource providers which helps with custom RDS cluster deployments
What do you like best about the product?
* Pulumi enables us to define our AWS cloud resources through IaC components which is versioned along with our application code.
* For our infrastructure testing requirements, it provides seamless testing, modularization and CI/CD integrations for our deployments.
* Since Pulumi keeps the metadata of our infrastructure, its easy to manage our cloud resources & we make use of its CLI to create/update/delete the stack state.
* There are no security concerns while running commands through its CLI, Pulumi doesn't store any of our cloud credentials. All configurations & secrets are encrypted by our encryption provider.
What do you dislike about the product?
* We didn't face any inconvenience while using Pulumi as its an open-source IaC platform best suited for our AWS deployments.
* We can easily validate our applications & infrastructure through any native testing frameworks.
* Pulumi Packages promotes reusability of our IaC scripts which saves us a lot of time. Each component is production-ready so we don't have to spend much time on configurations.
* Overall, we are satisfied with the services offered by Pulumi for our cloud infrastructure modularization & deployments.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
* We handle our CI/CD integrations, secret management & resource deployments through Pulumi Cloud platform.
* It offers more flexibility to configure our infrastructure for deployments & the event-based triggers which will update our stacks periodically.
* We utilize its built-in dynamic resource providers to incorporate arbitrary code straight into our Amazon RDS cluster deployment process.
* Further, we can seamlessly integrate various monitoring & observability tools such as Dynatrace, Grafana and Prometheus to gain accurate insights, carry out periodic health checks and keep track of performance & utilization of our cloud resources.
simplicity of provisioning infrastructure is truly remarkable.
What do you like best about the product?
I've had an amazing experience with Pulumi! The simplicity of provisioning infrastructure is truly remarkable.
What do you dislike about the product?
I'd rather have Pulumi handle its own state management.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Pulumi streamlines the process of provisioning infrastructure and empowers users with exceptional language flexibility to accomplish their tasks effortlessly.
Very Glad Experience with IaC
What do you like best about the product?
Best thing about Pulumi is the versatility that it has and the number of integrations to build cloud native applications, this tool makes the difference with the speed, best tool for our team
What do you dislike about the product?
Pulumi need more templates or examples to guide non senior teams into the adoption of the platform, Pulumi should create more guides in order to potentially increase adoption
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I have solved microservices, serverless architectures and event driven patterns, MLOps and Data Pipelines with this tooling, and it was very fast.
