CDK makes Cloudformation easy to use. Tight integration between cdk and services. Lots of reusable bits and parts. Forces you into component (construct) mindset

CDK makes Cloudformation easy to use. Tight integration between cdk and services. Lots of reusable bits and parts. Forces you into component (construct) mindset to handle complexity. Pulumi bypasses CF by making and breaking the resources directly. The focus on cross cloud and multiple cloud means you're thinking in higher order abstraction but you lose the finer knobs unless you break the indirection. CDK has ways to integrate directly into CodePipeline and use its own abstractions directly (such as with ecr or s3 deployments). Pulimi half expects you to have solved your CI/CD on your own. Reliability is a different problem. System shits its pants halfway through a cdk deployment? CDK rolls back and figures out the issues. Crash during Pulimi? Unknown state but you can rerun it and usually get back up and running.