pulumi-tf-provider-boilerplate VS cue

I'm interested in how to take existing high-quality Terraform Providers and convert them into Pulumi providers. Can you discuss the future roadmap for this project and any others around this effort.

The documentation on https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-tf-provider-boilerplate would benefit from more examples and further explanation. I had to reverse engineer the pulumi-aws provider to be able to wrap an existing TF provider.

> 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

I'm continuing to work on https://concise-encoding.org which is a new security-conscious ad-hoc encoding format to replace JSON/XML and friends. I've been at it for 3 years so far and am close to a release.

In a nutshell:

- Edit in text, transmit in binary. One can be seamlessly converted to the other, but binary is far more efficient for processing, storage and transmission, while text is better for humans to read and edit (which happens far less often than the other things).

- Secure by design: Everything is tightly specced and accounted for so that there aren't differences between implementations that can be exploited to compromise your system. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

- Real type support because coercing everything into strings sucks (and is another security risk and source of incompatibilities).

XML had a good run but was replaced by JSON which was a big improvement. JSON also had a good run but it's time for it to retire now that the landscape has changed even further: Security and efficiency are the desires of today, and JSON provides neither.

I've got the spec nailed down and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the reference implementation in golang. I still need to come up with a system for schemas, but I'm hoping that https://cuelang.org will fit the bill.

Has anyone taken a look at Cue who can share any experiences?

https://cuelang.org/

It's mentioned on the site as an alternative to Yaml. Recently watched (~half of) this intro to it: https://youtu.be/fR_yApIf6jU

the most interesting summary explanation of cue lang and its differences is from a bug filing - https://github.com/cuelang/cue/issues/33

>CUE is a bit different from the languages used in linguistics and more tailored to the general configuration issue as we've seen it at Google. But under the hood it adheres strictly to the concepts and principles of these approaches and we have been careful not to make the same mistakes made in BCL (which then were copied in all its offshoots). It also means that CUE can benefit from 30 years of research on this topic. For instance, under the hood, CUE uses a first-order unification algorithm, allowing us to build template extractors based on anti-unification (see issue #7 and #15), something that is not very meaningful or even possible with languages like BCL and Jsonnet.

I agree with you. Personally, I think Cue is much better than either YAML, TOML or JSON because it adds the concept of types to the idea of describing configuration.

true, but the tooling and workflow remains the same.

Not sure of any tool that could abstract the details sufficiently to be widely adopted. There is just too much nuance in cloud config.

I'm exploring using CUE (https://cuelang.org) to define TF resources, exporting as JSON for TF. So far it's much nicer