Pulumi Adds Native Terraform and HCL Support: A Unified Platform for Hybrid Infrastructure

Pulumi's announcement of native support for HashiCorp Terraform and OpenTofu marks a significant evolution in the infrastructure-as-code landscape. The company, which built its reputation on championing general-purpose programming languages for infrastructure, is now embracing HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) as a first-class citizen within its engine. This move isn't merely about adding another language option—it's a fundamental shift toward platform unification that acknowledges the reality of hybrid toolchains in modern enterprises.

The Technical Implementation: More Than Just Translation

The new capabilities operate on two distinct levels that address different pain points in infrastructure management.

Terraform State Management in Pulumi Cloud

Pulumi Cloud can now serve as a state backend and management plane for both Terraform and OpenTofu. This directly competes with HashiCorp Terraform Cloud while offering additional value through Pulumi's broader ecosystem. The integration provides:

• Unified visibility: Teams can view Terraform state operations alongside Pulumi deployments in a single dashboard
• Governance controls: Apply consistent policies across both Terraform and Pulumi workloads
• Access to Pulumi Neo: The AI engineering agent becomes available for Terraform projects, providing intelligent insights and automation

This capability is particularly relevant for organizations that have invested heavily in Terraform modules and workflows but want to consolidate their management plane. Rather than maintaining separate state backends for different tools, teams can centralize operations while preserving existing investments.

Native HCL Execution Engine

The second capability is more technically sophisticated. Instead of converting HCL into TypeScript or Python (as previous tools attempted), Pulumi's engine now interprets HCL directly using a Terraform bridge to access providers. This approach has several advantages:

1. Zero code conversion: Teams maintain their existing HCL codebases without translation overhead
2. Full ecosystem access: HCL configurations gain access to Pulumi's provider ecosystem (over 1,600 providers)
3. Polyglot architecture: Platform teams can build complex components in Go or Python, which are then consumed by other teams using simple HCL modules

The implementation uses a Terraform provider bridge that allows Pulumi's engine to communicate with Terraform providers directly. This means HCL configurations can leverage Pulumi's state management, drift detection, and preview capabilities while maintaining their original syntax.

Why This Matters: The Pragmatism of Hybrid Environments

Joe Duffy, Pulumi's founder and CEO, articulated the philosophy behind this shift: "We are not dogmatic about languages, we love all of them. The L in HCL and YAML stands for 'language', and we've always had a 'come one, come all' mindset."

This statement reflects a maturing understanding of enterprise infrastructure needs. The reality is that most organizations operate in hybrid environments:

• Legacy investment: Years of Terraform modules, providers, and workflows
• Team preferences: Different teams have different skill sets and tool preferences
• Organizational constraints: Migrating entire infrastructure codebases is risky and expensive

The IBM acquisition of HashiCorp and subsequent licensing changes have created additional uncertainty. Many organizations are evaluating alternatives but face the practical challenge of migration costs and operational disruption.

Pulumi's approach offers a middle path: maintain existing investments while gradually adopting new capabilities. Teams can run Terraform and OpenTofu projects alongside new Pulumi deployments, using a single management plane. This reduces the operational friction typically associated with switching infrastructure tools.

The Financial Incentive: An "Escape Hatch" Program

To further lower the barrier to adoption, Pulumi introduced a financial program that allows customers to apply credits equivalent to their remaining HashiCorp contract value toward Pulumi usage. This addresses a critical business concern: the cost of running parallel systems during transition periods.

For organizations with multi-year HashiCorp commitments, this program effectively reduces the financial risk of exploring Pulumi. It acknowledges that infrastructure tool migrations aren't just technical challenges—they're significant financial decisions that require careful planning.

Competitive Landscape and Strategic Positioning

The infrastructure-as-code market has become increasingly complex:

• HashiCorp Terraform: Still the industry standard for declarative infrastructure, though now under Business Source License
• OpenTofu: The open-source fork gaining traction as a community-driven alternative
• Crossplane: Offering a control-plane approach to infrastructure management
• Other tools: Including newer entrants like "formae" that aim to challenge Terraform's dominance

By integrating HCL and Terraform state management, Pulumi positions itself not as a replacement for these tools, but as a unifying platform. This is a strategic move that acknowledges the fragmented nature of the market and offers consolidation rather than further fragmentation.

Practical Implications for Teams

For Platform Teams

Platform teams can now offer a unified platform that supports multiple infrastructure-as-code approaches. This reduces the cognitive load on developers who need to learn different tools for different tasks. A typical workflow might look like:

1. Platform team builds a complex Kubernetes deployment in Go using Pulumi
2. Application teams consume this deployment using simple HCL modules
3. All deployments are managed through Pulumi Cloud with consistent governance

For Application Teams

Application teams can continue using familiar HCL syntax while gaining access to Pulumi's broader capabilities. This is particularly valuable for teams that:

• Have deep expertise in Terraform providers and modules
• Need to integrate with existing CI/CD pipelines built around Terraform
• Want to gradually adopt Pulumi's programming language capabilities

For Organizations

Organizations can:

• Consolidate management tools while preserving existing investments
• Reduce vendor lock-in by maintaining flexibility in tool choice
• Standardize on a single platform for governance and compliance
• Gradually migrate workloads without disruptive "big bang" migrations

Migration Path and Considerations

For teams considering this approach, the migration path typically involves:

1. Assessment: Inventory existing Terraform/OpenTofu projects and identify candidates for migration
2. Pilot: Start with non-critical workloads to validate the integration
3. Parallel operation: Run Terraform and Pulumi side-by-side during transition
4. Gradual migration: Move workloads incrementally as confidence grows
5. Consolidation: Eventually standardize on Pulumi for new workloads while maintaining legacy systems

The private beta program (with general availability expected in Q1 2026) provides an opportunity for early adopters to validate the approach and provide feedback.

Looking Ahead

This announcement signals a broader trend in the infrastructure tooling space: the move toward platform consolidation rather than tool replacement. As organizations increasingly operate in multi-cloud, multi-tool environments, the need for unified management planes becomes more critical.

Pulumi's approach—embracing rather than replacing existing tools—may set a precedent for how infrastructure tooling evolves. Rather than forcing organizations to choose between competing tools, the future may lie in platforms that can orchestrate multiple tools through a unified interface.

For practitioners, this means more flexibility in tool choice and reduced operational overhead. For the industry, it represents a maturing market where pragmatic solutions to real-world problems take precedence over ideological purity.

The success of this approach will ultimately depend on execution: how well the integration works in practice, how seamless the user experience is, and whether the promised benefits materialize in real-world environments. Early indications suggest Pulumi has addressed the technical challenges of HCL execution and Terraform state management, but the true test will come when organizations begin deploying this in production at scale.