OpenStack Heat vs Pulumi

OpenStack Heat is a free, open-source orchestration service for composite applications in OpenStack. Declarative templates describe infrastructure and relationships in human-readable files that can be version-controlled. Heat can create instances, floating IPs, volumes, security groups, and users, while supporting instance high availability, autoscaling, and nested stacks. It runs HOT templates written in YAML and also accepts AWS CloudFormation templates. Templates can integrate with Puppet and Ansible, and operators can extend capabilities with plugins. The service exposes an OpenStack-native REST API and a CloudFormation-compatible Query API. Access is available through a command-line interface, RESTful queries, and the OpenStack dashboard. Heat runs on Linux as a self-hosted service and is provided under the Apache 2.0 license. Installation assumes an existing OpenStack environment with Compute, Image Service, and Identity, with guidance covering Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Debian.

Pulumi helps engineers define and manage infrastructure as code using general-purpose languages. Supported languages include TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go,.NET, Java, YAML, and HCL, with providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Cloudflare, Datadog, and GitHub. Pulumi ESC centralizes secrets and configuration from major vaults and cloud providers and supports short-lived credentials through OIDC. Pulumi Neo can plan and execute infrastructure tasks, debug deployments, generate code, and provide cloud insights. Pulumi Deployments integrates with CI/CD services including Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, CircleCI, GitHub, GitLab, Google Cloud Build, and Jenkins. The CLI runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and can use self-managed state backends such as S3, Azure Blob, GCS, or local storage. Listed capabilities include policy as code, drift detection, resource import, and self-hosted execution. The free plan includes one user and up to 500 workflow minutes. Essentials costs $40 a month, Pro $400 a month, and Enterprise $2,000 a month. Pulumi states that its platform is SOC 2 Type II certified.