I've been part of managing rather large Terraform infrastructures (1000+ resources) for a couple of years, but I'm a Pulumi n00b with only about a month of experience.
The infrastructure I'm managing right now with Pulumi is much smaller, only around 130-140 different resources.
For me it ultimately came down to developer productivity. I'm much better at convincing Pulumi to do what I want compared to how it was with Terraform. This also makes me a much happier and less frustrated developer :).
My priorities might very well be different if I were to manage much larger infrastructures (infra cost would be more important for example).
The stack I manage with Pulumi is currently around 300 resources. (I think that count is inflated by all the secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, because each secret has two resources: the secret and the current version.) I currently manage it by myself, but I'm hoping that won't be the case for very long.
Maybe the ending of my previous comment was too cynical. But I think I've repeatedly made the mistake of valuing my productivity and happiness as a currently solo developer over what will let my company take full advantage of a big third-party ecosystem (including a large talent pool).
I don't think you're too cynical at all - I think you're exactly right! It's often much more sensible to use the "tried and true" stuff most of the time.
In my particular case I don't plan to have my company grow much at all - we're staying small. I think Pulumi is a sensible "bet" for me, because it does what I need right now really well. Sure, there's a bit of a risk, but worst case scenario I would spend a day or two to migrate what I have back to Terraform.
I would definitely not have made the call to "let's just switch everything to Pulumi" if I was still working at a larger company. As you said, a large talent pool / community is a huge deal when you have the option to hire people who can spend time learning a particular tool or language.
I've been part of managing rather large Terraform infrastructures (1000+ resources) for a couple of years, but I'm a Pulumi n00b with only about a month of experience.
The infrastructure I'm managing right now with Pulumi is much smaller, only around 130-140 different resources.
For me it ultimately came down to developer productivity. I'm much better at convincing Pulumi to do what I want compared to how it was with Terraform. This also makes me a much happier and less frustrated developer :).
My priorities might very well be different if I were to manage much larger infrastructures (infra cost would be more important for example).