Kelsey Hightower on Kubernetes education and Terraform vs Pulumi

Kelsey Hightower and the human element

Kelsey Hightower told KubeCon 2026 attendees that AI-generated code remains half-baked. He argued that companies that refuse to maintain open source software lose their competitive advantage. Because humans provide the community and culture that AI cannot replicate, Hightower suggested that engineers find someone better than them to learn from. He wants practitioners to understand how Kubernetes works to prevent security vulnerabilities. He notes that companies attempting to use AI-generated recipes will retreat at the first sign of a security flaw. He also discussed the deprecation of Ingress NGINX and how enterprises scramble when projects they depend on fail. He suggests that companies allocate a percentage of budget to support open source and Postgres communities through hires and maintenance. He told attendees that everyone becomes a junior engineer when it comes to AI. He reminds engineers that they should learn how the system works to be successful. Kelsey Hightower, who previously worked at Google and CoreOS, remains a major voice in the Kubernetes community. He co-founded KubeCon and co-wrote the book Kubernetes Up and Running. He often speaks about the history of software and how developers interact with infrastructure. He believes that engineers should focus on learning the underlying principles of the systems they manage. If you manage these systems, you need to know how they work. He once noted that the goal of his "Kubernetes the Hard Way" guide was to teach people how to stand up a cluster from scratch using six VMs.

The infrastructure as code divide

The choice between Terraform and Pulumi dictates how teams manage cloud resources. Terraform uses HCL, while Pulumi uses Python, TypeScript, Go, C#, Java, F#, or YAML. The provider ecosystem for Terraform contains 4,800 providers, a count 2.7 times larger than the Pulumi registry of 1,800 providers for organizations that require niche SaaS support like Datadog, PagerDuty, or Cloudflare Workers within their production stack. Pulumi bridges Terraform providers through the pulumi-terraform-bridgeproject. Terraform holds 76% of the market according to Hakia, while Pulumi holds 12% share. According to DevOps.com, Terraform usage reached 60% against Pulumi’s 20% in a report published January 2026. ComputingForGeeks pegged Terraform’s market share at 32.8% in August 2026, and Terraform’s 49,700 GitHub stars exceed Pulumi’s 25,700 stars. Pulumi’s AWS provider covers new services within 48 hours of announcement, while Terraform’s AWS provider version 6.62.0 added support for DSQL and ECS in August 2026. OpenTofu remains a community-driven fork under the Linux Foundation using the MPL 2.0 license. This fork provides a drop-in replacement for teams that require an OSI-approved license. Terraform and OpenTofu store state as a JSON file, typically in a remote backend like S3, Azure Blob, or Google Cloud Storage. OpenTofu added native, built-in encryption for state files. Terraform expects teams to bring their own encryption at the storage layer. Pulumi encrypts secret values inside its graph by default using a per-stack encryption key. Pulumi’s Python SDK shows slower plan and apply speeds than the Go-based OpenTofu in mid-2026 benchmarks, though Pulumi detects drift faster. Hiring for Terraform remains easier, as Terraform experience on a CV appears three times more frequent than Pulumi experience according to LinkedIn Talent Insights.

Pricing and implementation decisions

I recommend Pulumi for engineering teams that want to use real programming languages. Pulumi provides TypeScript autocompletion and compile-time type checking. Terraform uses HCL, which remains easy to audit for operations engineers. Pulumi allows developers to use loops, conditionals, and package managers. The BSL 1.1 license from HashiCorp creates the reason for the market split. HashiCorp retired the user-based Free plan for HCP Terraform on March 31, 2026. Pulumi Cloud Essentials costs $40 per month, while HCP Terraform Essentials costs $0.10 per resource per month. Pulumi Cloud overage costs $0.1825 per resource per month. Pulumi Team Edition provides up to 10 users and 3,000 deployment minutes for $75 to $90 per month. Pulumi Enterprise on AWS Marketplace costs $32,850 per year, but Pulumi Business Critical on Azure Marketplace costs $50,000 per year. Spacelift provides a way to manage both Pulumi and Terraform workflows by scaling based on concurrency. Terraform provides a mature environment with tools like terraform fmt and terraform plan. Pulumi provides an Automation API that lets developers drive deployments from their own applications. Spacelift remains a competitive choice because it supports OpenTofu and Ansible as well. Will the BSL license change the market share again?