porter VS pulumi-terraform-bridge

This is just a concept. AFAIK only one implemented this concept is Microsoft's project porter: https://github.com/getporter/porter

For porter I am talking about this project https://porter.run/ and NOT this https://porter.sh/

Porter

As far as I know the tool is used at least in Microsoft. The classic use case is where you want to install an application and also define the infrastructure as well (i.e cluster + db + lb + app). You can see the examples here https://github.com/getporter/porter/tree/main/examples

Check https://cnab.io/ and https://porter.sh/

I'm closely tracking an effort by Microsoft that aims to do a lot of what you're describing since I find myself bridging between these tools and deploying stacks that span tools and roles. [CNAB](https://cnab.io/) and the front-running implementation, [Porter](https://porter.sh/), enable one-step infra deployments, packaged as a single OCI-compatible container, with any number of steps, using the best tools for each of those steps. Think of using aws-cli for some initialization step (create or verify presence of a state bucket), applying some terraform to create infra, and finishing with a helm chart to complete deployment of app components. Each stage in a bundle packages not only the code to run it but also the execution binary of the tool that runs it. The spec and porter are still a moving target but it's a promising space and a nice adjacent evolution of the current state of tooling.

Cool, it's great to know that it isn't abandoned.

I'm not sure why you'd say that their business model was a success. They were bought by Microsoft for Azure. I guess I wonder if a PaaS company can survive without getting the profits off renting the machines to people. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have PaaS options based around the idea that it comes bundled with the compute, not as a standalone open-source thing for you to use on any platform.

I guess the question is whether Porter's business plan is "make enough that a company that owns a cloud wants to buy us". Oracle could probably use a nice PaaS platform and team. Maybe DigitalOcean would like to beef up their PaaS offering by acqui-hiring a team with proven knowledge.

Poking around https://deislabs.io, it's interesting to see that they have a project called "Porter" which seems to be unrelated to the "Porter" being launched here: https://porter.sh. They aren't quite the same, but they both have "easily run your app" goals.

There is already this from Microsoft https://github.com/getporter/porter

GA: automatic token mapping and aliasing in the bridge, which we're now using to simplify the resources.go file in bridged providers

Yes, pulumi is just wrapping terraform[1]. So you need to understand both the quirks of that and the quirks of pulumi. And I'm lazy so I just want to deal with one quirk at the time.

[1] https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

After digging, I saw python libraries in my venv directory that is related to Terraform Bridge and the tool that was used to generate code - https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

They have an open source tool that translates the TF providers into Pulumi providers, so people could continue to build updated providers - https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge

> If Pulumi didn't bless it, it doesn't exist in Pulumi's world.

That has not been my experience. I have personally ported a Sentry TF provider into Pulumi, and I will grant you that their docs and examples are bordering on active user hatred for exercising the process, but it does work:

https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge#adapting-a...

https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-tf-provider-boilerplate#rea...

What mystifies me about that situation is that I do actually appreciate the amount of silliness that is required to avoid using Pulumi cloud: they are not financially incentivized to make that easy, but I'd guess a lot more folks would nope right out if they didn't make it possible

However, I would think they'd want to make ingesting a TF provider into Pulumi as smooth and reliable as possible, so they don't have people close their browser tab when they don't find a supported provider for Pulumi but it exists in TF

For provisioning infrastructure in AWS, there are other tools besides those provided by AWS themselves. This includes Terraform and Pulumi. Both of these are not tied to any particular public cloud provider, or not even to public cloud providers only. Any kind of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider that can provide some service or infrastructure via programming interfaces can in theory be provisioned by these tools. Terraform has a long list of providers, and Pulumi can use Terraform providers in addition to its providers.

I think they might use their (pulumi-terraform-bridge)[https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-terraform-bridge] to generate some of their provider code from the corresponding Terraform providers? (This page mentioned some of their "most interesting providers" are created like this)[https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/vs/terraform/#using-terraform-providers].