Why Pulumi’s infrastructure-as-code platform matters for multi-cloud

Teams migrating from Terraform or CloudFormation find that Pulumi provides a way to manage multi-cloud resources through general-purpose programming languages. While Terraform uses HCL, Pulumi uses Python, TypeScript, Go, and .NET to define infrastructure. This approach allows engineers to use familiar loops, classes, and functions to manage complex logic. One engineer who moved from ARM templates to Pulumi found that using a language like Python allowed them to manage their infrastructure while still performing the software engineering tasks they actually enjoyed doing. This flexibility helps teams manage resources across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Digital Ocean within a single program. One team reduced 1,000 lines of Helm code to fewer than 200 lines of Pulumi code. Because Pulumi works in an imperative way with a declarative core, the engine diffs the desired state from the current known state to produce a plan. As of 2026, Pulumi supports over 180 providers, while Terraform supports over 200. Because IBM acquired HashiCorp in February 2025, Terraform releases from version 1.6.0 onward use the Business Source License (BUSL 1.1), which is not an open-source license. This licensing change creates uncertainty for teams that require a permanently open-source tool. The platform has grown to serve over 10,000 users and more than 100 paying customers. This growth reflects a shift toward using programming languages to manage the full spectrum of cloud challenges, from development to security engineering.

Simplifying complex cloud deployments

Pulumi simplifies complex deployments through reusable components that encapsulate cloud resources into logical units. These components, often defined as classes that extend the ComponentResource base class, reduce code duplication and help teams enforce standards across different projects. You know how configuration drift makes production environments deviate from staging? Pulumi detects these changes by comparing the desired state against a record of existing resources. Because Pulumi allows developers to use familiar programming languages, they can use the same testing techniques they used in application development to catch mistakes before they reach production environments in any major cloud provider available today. The platform integrates testing into existing frameworks like pytest or Jest. Pulumi 3.0 also introduced the Automation API, which turns the platform into a library that other applications call to provision their own infrastructure. The platform provides the CI/CD Assistant to help deploy cloud infrastructure through more than a dozen popular platforms like GitLab CI and Jenkins. However, Pulumi can be difficult to start with for those without a coding background. One engineer noted that managing directory structures becomes complicated as a project grows. How will the industry react to the rise of programming-based infrastructure if developers prioritize code over configuration?

Scaling via managed services

Organizations scale their usage through several pricing tiers that align with their specific resource needs. The Individual tier provides automatic state management and secret management at no cost, along with 500 deployment minutes per month. The Team edition provides 150,000 free credits monthly and 3,000 deployment minutes per month, while allowing up to 10 users and a concurrency of 5. If a team exceeds these limits, additional usage costs $0.0005 per credit. The Enterprise tier supports unlimited users and teams and provides migration from Terraform. The Business Critical tier provides 24/7 support and self-hosting capabilities. This top tier also includes organizational policy enforcement, remediation policies, and audit log exports. The Team edition also includes webhooks to facilitate automation. This tier serves small to medium-sized projects by allowing costs to scale with usage. Users can manage their deployment workflows through the Pulumi Cloud console.