pulumi-aws VS terraform-plugin-sdk

Sure, but the providers for some of the biggest platforms are maintained by HashiCorp[1] - like the AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes providers[2], and it appears the Pulumi AWS provider (for example) _does_ use the Terraform AWS provider, even to this day[3].

1. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers... - "official" providers are maintained by HashiCorp

2. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official - The filtered list of "official" providers maintained by HashiCorp

3. https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc24303... - Just prove it to myself, I can see the `upstream` git submodule, which embeds pulumi/terraform-provider-aws, which is a fork of hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws, although the repo was not created as a fork in Github, so it is not marked as a "fork" and so I have to compare commit histories to tell that it is a fork.

>Isn't pulumi aws just terraform under the hood still?

It depends.

The AWS "Classic" provider uses the terraform provider [1].

The AWS "Native" provider does not, and instead uses the AWS Cloud Control API [2].

[1]: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws

[2]: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws-native

Pulumi uses terraform providers to schematize the CRUD options for some cloud providers. Part of the difficulty with any infrastructure as code offering is that your favourite cloud provider doesn't always provide a full API spec, so we need to somehow figure out what resources can be created, what parameters are available to those resources etc. We take the terraform provider, look at the available operations for that provider and then turned it into a Pulumi schema, which can then be read by the Pulumi engine. If you take a look here you can actually see that generated schema for AWS.

Reference : Plugin Development url references

> We're coming up on 10000 resources in our main Terraform repository and while there is definitely some friction, it's overall much better than having to hit the cloud API's to gather each of those states which would probably take at least an order of magnitude longer.

I don't think that's necessary true. Most cloud API's actually can return hundreds of records with 1 API calls, e.g. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/APIR... has a maximum page size of 400.

If I manage the cloud resources via some custom tools and/or with some ansible-fu, I can decide to batch the API calls when it makes sense.

With terraform, it is not possible to do so (https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-plugin-sdk/issues/66, https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws/issues/2...).

While it would be nice for Terraform to find duplicate resource blocks prior to the apply, it's impossible for it to do this without knowledge of the underlying provider being used. As an example, in AWS you could have multiple aws_instance resource blocks with identical attributes and it would be a perfectly acceptable situation (you'd probably be better off with an ASG, but I digress). The real issue here is that the Azure API is not returning an error when the duplicate resource group is being created. The parent feature request mentions other situations, some resulting in errors (preferred/acceptable), others resulting in duplicate resources. However, none are as potentially dangerous as a resource group since it can contain any number of other resources.

Currently, we are working on an internal refactoring to clean up code from the past years, even before we started the maintainership. Due to the upgrade to terraform-sdk-v2, we have new abilities for logging, debugging, and testing in isolation. Also, tools for the generation of documentation will simplify the process and keep it up-to-date. But first of all, we want to fix the reported bugs and clarify if they are still present after the update. We also plan to add support for running docker behind a jump host and provision docker containers. Our most aspiring goal is to come close to the docker CLI as possible. To achieve this, we plan to review which code we can reuse and integrate. For example, this has already been happened in the past to allow the converging possibility for docker services. We plan to add the generation of the changelog as we enforce already conventional commits from angular. After talking about the path towards milestone 3.0, we wrap it up with the conclusion.

Thank you for pointing that out u/tgulacsi I changed the type to Int and the panic issue was resolved; however, preferably I would like to use what the API definition states which is int64, but if I understood correctly, there is no native way of doing without conversion according to this GitHub Issue, which seems to be more of Terraform limitation than anything.

This particular situation is interesting because I can't think of any situation where it would be valid for Create to return a real null without also indicating an error, and so in theory the SDK itself could catch that situation and report it to you using SDK terminology instead, perhaps even directing you to make sure you called d.SetId. It could be worth sharing this experience as an issue in the Terraform SDK repository so that the team which works on the SDK can consider whether it's possible for the SDK to give you better feedback in this situation, rather than just returning the invalid result to Terraform Core to check.

I did some more work on this and it seems [1] is the way to go, because it indeed prevents an explosion of resources (and as a result lots of duplication in the documentation). Secondly, there are explicit provisions in the terraform plugin SDK to handle sets of fields which are conflicting with others, so mistakes are handled even at terraform init.