pulumi-terraform-bridge VS pulumi-aws

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].

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.