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iac tooling Draft 2026-01-18
When Terraform isn't the answer.
Pulumi, CDK, Ansible, plain shell — and the project shapes where Terraform is actually the wrong pick. A working taxonomy for picking the right IaC tool.
Draft — coming soon.
Terraform is the default answer in a lot of DevOps shops. Sometimes it’s the right answer. Sometimes it’s the wrong answer and nobody notices because nobody’s used anything else in five years.
This post is a working taxonomy for picking the right infrastructure-as-code tool, written for teams who have only ever used one of them. Covers:
- Pulumi, where real programming-language features actually matter
- CDK, for teams already deep in TypeScript or Python
- Ansible, for configuration management that isn’t infrastructure provisioning
- Plain shell, for small, specific, one-shot things
- Where Terraform is still the right pick, and why
The Guide, as always, is mostly harmless. Until it isn’t.