pulumi-tf-provider-boilerplate VS dhall-kubernetes

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 hate yaml with a passion. It marginally better than xml for reading (wins huge on comment syntax) and worse for everything else. It makes zero sense we somehow ended up with it as standard configuration serialization format.

Note yaml is not a DSL. It's a tree serialization format! Everything interesting is happening after it is parsed. Extreme examples point to e.g. github actions conditions.

Anyway, back on topic - maybe not prolog for CDK, but still quite interesting: Dhall-kubernetes - https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

At this point, if it’s painful enough, why isn’t compiling-to-yml tools more popular?

Example: https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Haven’t used dhall myself but I’d definitely prefer a DSL on top of yaml.

Dhall provides https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes which is exactly this: statically type-checked kubernetes config generation.

Dhall is my favorite configuration language that I never get around to using.

I manage DNS in Terraform, and since every Terraform provider uses different objects definitions, and every object definition is rather verbose, Dhall would be a way to specify my own DRY types and leave the provider-specific details in one place. Adding new DNS entries and moving several domains between providers would be a matter of changing fewer lines.

Dhall also has Kubernetes bindings:

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Although I'm tempted to just stick to Helm here, even though it's less type-safe.

Not Helm directly, but does something like Dhall fit your question? https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Have you heard about Dhall? It’s a programming language used for generating configuration files for a variety of purposes. One of them is to replace old and limited formats such as JSON and YAML. It is DRYable, secure, and even suitable for creating K8s manifests. The latter option isn’t something for anyone: you have to learn a new language and deal with its peculiarities, but it might be really helpful when you have tons of YAML configs. I’ve recently made a short intro to Dhall for K8s in this review.

Best thing is Dhall that I am aware of. Same situation, working as a consultant, forced to use broken things.

https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes

Lets look at a specific example. Take Kubernetes: everything is yaml, with complete schemas, all the way down. From your perspective this is configuration utopia, right? Meanwhile back in reality k8s is the poster child of "yaml hell". From the day it was released, people took one look at it, gave it a giant NOPE and instantly spawned half a dozen templating languages. The most popular of these is helm, which has a terrible, no good, very bad design: full of potential injection attacks from purely textual string substitution, manually specified indentation to embed parameterized blocks, virtually no intermediate validation, no way to validate unused features, etc etc

Compare to dhall which publishes a complete set of dhall-k8s schema mappings which enables you to factor out any design you want down to as few configuration variables as you like, while validating the configuration generators themselves at design time. https://github.com/dhall-lang/dhall-kubernetes#more-modular-...

The solution I like is Dhall. They even have a Kubernetes solution that will catch a lot of issues at compile-time, before you try to apply it to Kubernetes. At earthly we aren't actually using it though. Our Kubernetes guru found it to be a bit slow but I am hopeful it or something like it will be the future.