AWS CDK vs Pulumi: Why SST Chose Pulumi

Serverless Stack (SST) transitioned from AWS's Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to Pulumi to overcome the limitations of being tied to AWS infrastructure and the complexities of using CloudFormation, which hindered debugging and multi-cloud capabilities. Pulumi offers a provider-agnostic infrastructure as code (IaC) solution, allowing SST to support multiple cloud providers and on-premises platforms, thereby enhancing flexibility, visibility, and extensibility for developers. This transition aligns infrastructure code with application development workflows, simplifying the mental model for developers and enabling them to manage infrastructure using the same programming languages as their application code. The move to Pulumi enables SST to improve deployment workflows, integrate seamlessly with application frameworks, and expand provider support, ultimately empowering developers to focus on application development while managing infrastructure more efficiently. SST leverages Pulumi for its deployment engine while maintaining some integrations with Terraform and generates revenue primarily through its managed service, SST Console.