Used For

• +**Your infrastructure changes break production because Steve forgot to update the load balancer** → Write it once in code, deploy identical copies to dev/staging/prod every time
• +**Provisioning customer environments takes your team 3 days of manual clicking** → Automated customer onboarding that creates complete infrastructure in 10 minutes
• +**You're managing AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud with three different tools** → Single codebase that deploys to any cloud without rewriting everything
• +Multi-language support - write infrastructure in Python, TypeScript, Go, or whatever your team already knows
• +Policy enforcement built-in - automatically blocks engineers from creating expensive resources or exposing databases to the internet

Best For

• >Your team of 50+ engineers keeps manually clicking through AWS dashboards and someone finally snapped
• >Building a SaaS where each customer needs their own isolated infrastructure setup
• >Platform team tired of engineers asking "can you spin up another environment" 20 times a week

Not For

• -Teams under 20 people without dedicated DevOps folks — the setup complexity will eat your entire sprint
• -Anyone wanting point-and-click infrastructure management — this is code-first, period
• -Companies already standardized on Terraform with no complaints — if it ain't broke, don't fix it

Pairs With

• *GitHub Actions (where your infrastructure code gets tested and deployed automatically on every pull request)
• *AWS Secrets Manager (to store database passwords and API keys that your Pulumi code references)
• *Datadog (for monitoring the infrastructure that Pulumi creates, because code deployments can still break)
• *Slack (where you get notifications when deployments succeed or spectacularly fail at 2am)
• *Terraform (some teams run both - Terraform for the foundation, Pulumi for the app-specific stuff)
• *Kubernetes (Pulumi deploys and configures your K8s clusters instead of wrestling with YAML files)

The Catch

• !You need actual programming skills, not just YAML copy-pasting — expect 2-4 weeks before developers become productive
• !The learning curve is steep if your team isn't comfortable with software development practices like Git workflows and testing
• !Pricing isn't listed anywhere obvious, which usually means "call for enterprise quote" territory

Bottom Line

Turns your cloud infrastructure into actual software code, but requires real programming skills to not hate your life.