I've been doing overall automation and continuous deployment for over a decade, but it wasn't until I discovered Pulumi that I went all-in for the infrastructure part. As a developer I prefer to use code compared to yaml or something else. I like it because it gives me more trust, if you use a strongly typed version of pulumi like Typescript, and faster feedback since you get answers back directly during compilation. Having things in code also makes it possible to run "patch jobs" for resources in-process instead of running that code outside the provisioning. Being able to run the "patch job" in-process is excellent for the rare occasions when there might be a missing option in the SDK, which has happened once over three years with the Azure AD provider. I would argue that most companies need a tool like Pulumi, since the pure cloud tools are limited to just that cloud provider. If you are a larger company, you also want to automate things like Kubernetes, GitHub, Opsgenie and other services out there, and Pulumi has support for a lot of them. Pulumi automation is another feature we have used to build a self-service application where anyone can "order" different resources through a simple UI and then the application would create them using Pulumi in a compliant manner. Lastly I would also like to highlight how Pulumi deals with configuration and secrets. How you both store secure configuration in Pulumi and share outputs between different deployments in Pulumi is a killer feature that has simplified a lot of work for us. I often use Pulumi to deal with configuration for more minor things where I'm testing things out since it is much more secure than copying a file. Storing secrets in the Pulumi configuration also makes it very easy to get a new user app running by creating a small script that reads the config and sets appropriate environment variables to get going. If there is one "infrastructure as code" tool I would recommend, it is Pulumi!

As a Software Engineer I like the ability to use the same programming language (Go in my case) I use for the main application. It's easier to start to create infrastructure with Pulumi then with other tools.

Pulumi enables for infrastructure code all the quality-of-life improvements that we software developers have come to expect for other code. With it, I have rich IDE support, excellent unit and integration testing capabilities, great static and dynamic analysis, tight integration into build and deployment pipelines, and all the other things that I now consider essential for a satisfactory development experience. The support (both paid and community-provided) is excellent, the ecosystem of extensions is extensive, and the catalogue of examples is very good (and improving all the time). Adopting it as a free tool initially means you have to rapidly learn some of the harder concepts; when the tool proves its worth to you and your organization, you naturally move to the paid services and quickly realize how much value they provide across a team and a company.