Pulumi is a versatile infrastructure automation tool that integrates both imperative and declarative paradigms, utilizing imperative languages like Python, JavaScript, or C# for coding while the Pulumi engine processes these codes declaratively. This dual approach allows users to define their desired infrastructure state with imperative programming, which does not directly execute resource provisioning. Instead, the Pulumi CLI and deployment engine interpret these models, compute necessary actions, and ensure the actual infrastructure aligns with the intended state, leveraging a declarative engine that uses a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to manage resource dependencies and order of operations. Providers, which interact with cloud APIs, operate imperatively to execute the CRUD actions needed to align the infrastructure with the desired state. Pulumi's architecture, therefore, blends imperative coding for defining infrastructure with declarative execution to offer a flexible solution for infrastructure automation.