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TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs - and the vast majority ain't even developed by Hashicorp in the first place. If Pulumi - another open-source

TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs - and the vast majority ain't even developed by Hashicorp in the first place. If Pulumi - another open-source infra-as-code tool (that ain't even a fork of any Hashicorp product AFAICT) - is really the thing scaring Hashicorp away from open source, then that doesn't really do Hashicorp any favors here.

quacker 3y ago
> TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor.
- yellowapple 3y ago
  > If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient. > Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor. Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully still is). There is literally nothing stopping Hashicorp from doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.
  - quacker 3y ago
    Are you pretending they aren't a competitor profiting off that work though? Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/ https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/. So, Pulumi has grown their directly competing product partially on top of the Terraform ecosystem - and I'd argue they'd be half as successful without reusing Terraform providers - and make money off of that product. It's at least understandable to me that Hashicorp doesn't like this.
    - lijok 3y ago
      Most TF providers are not maintained by Hashicorp, but by the company whose product the provider integrates into. Development of the provider is an investment the company makes to lower CAC.
      - quacker 3y ago
        Sure, but the providers for some of the biggest platforms are maintained by HashiCorp[1] - like the AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes providers[2], and it appears the Pulumi AWS provider (for example) _does_ use the Terraform AWS provider, even to this day[3]. 1. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers#provider-tiers-namespaces https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers... - "official" providers are maintained by HashiCorp 2. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official - The filtered list of "official" providers maintained by HashiCorp 3. https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc2430357d044f58394b96e94fa43 https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc24303... - Just prove it to myself, I can see the `upstream` git submodule, which embeds pulumi/terraform-provider-aws, which is a fork of hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws, although the repo was not created as a fork in Github, so it is not marked as a "fork" and so I have to compare commit histories to tell that it is a fork.
        hughesjj 3y ago
        Imo this is notable as historically hashicorp has beaten even AWS to (cloud formation, and, thus, cdk) support for their newly launched services.
        jkodroff 3y ago
        The Pulumi Kubernetes provider is a native provider. It does not take a TF provider as a dependency. Instead, it works directly based off the k8s API spec. The Google TF provider is actually maintained by Google via Magic Modules, a single source for both TF and Ansible . The generated TF provider does reside in HashiCorp’s GH org tho.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
- thayne 3y ago
  Would terraform have been successful without the ecosystem of providers provided by third parties, and many, many external contributions to providers they do manage?

quacker 3y ago

> TF providers are just wrappers around other APIs If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor.

yellowapple 3y ago
> If it's so simple, Pulumi could have done this themselves. Why didn't they? Because that would be a waste of time unless there's some specific case where an existing provider is insufficient. > Would Pulumi have been as successful without leveraging the vast ecosystem of existing Terraform providers? Now they are a growing Terraform competitor. Pulumi itself is free software, just like Terraform was (and hopefully still is). There is literally nothing stopping Hashicorp from doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.
- quacker 3y ago
  Are you pretending they aren't a competitor profiting off that work though? Pulumi is free, except you pay for the features that aren't free: https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/ https://www.pulumi.com/pricing/. So, Pulumi has grown their directly competing product partially on top of the Terraform ecosystem - and I'd argue they'd be half as successful without reusing Terraform providers - and make money off of that product. It's at least understandable to me that Hashicorp doesn't like this.
  - lijok 3y ago
    Most TF providers are not maintained by Hashicorp, but by the company whose product the provider integrates into. Development of the provider is an investment the company makes to lower CAC.
    - quacker 3y ago
      Sure, but the providers for some of the biggest platforms are maintained by HashiCorp[1] - like the AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes providers[2], and it appears the Pulumi AWS provider (for example) _does_ use the Terraform AWS provider, even to this day[3]. 1. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers#provider-tiers-namespaces https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/registry/providers... - "official" providers are maintained by HashiCorp 2. https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers?tier=official - The filtered list of "official" providers maintained by HashiCorp 3. https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc2430357d044f58394b96e94fa43 https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/tree/008c4360bc9fc24303... - Just prove it to myself, I can see the `upstream` git submodule, which embeds pulumi/terraform-provider-aws, which is a fork of hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws, although the repo was not created as a fork in Github, so it is not marked as a "fork" and so I have to compare commit histories to tell that it is a fork.
      - hughesjj 3y ago
        Imo this is notable as historically hashicorp has beaten even AWS to (cloud formation, and, thus, cdk) support for their newly launched services.
      - jkodroff 3y ago
        The Pulumi Kubernetes provider is a native provider. It does not take a TF provider as a dependency. Instead, it works directly based off the k8s API spec. The Google TF provider is actually maintained by Google via Magic Modules, a single source for both TF and Ansible . The generated TF provider does reside in HashiCorp’s GH org tho.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
thayne 3y ago
Would terraform have been successful without the ecosystem of providers provided by third parties, and many, many external contributions to providers they do manage?