Context

I need a robust Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool to manage the underlying services for the personal site (Cloudflare Pages, DNS, Storage, etc.). The requirements are:

• Reproducibility: Infrastructure should be defined in code, version-controlled, and reproducible.
• State Management: The tool must track the state of deployed resources to detect drift and manage updates safely.
• Extensibility: The solution should support any Cloud Service Provider (AWS, GCP, Azure), not just Cloudflare.
• Independence: The IaC tool should not be tightly coupled to the application's specific language version or runtime (not locked into a TypeScript monorepo forever).

Decision

I will use Terraform.

Alternatives

Pulumi

Pulumi is a modern alternative that allows defining infrastructure using general-purpose programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Go, etc.). Pre-coding-agents, this would have been my choice.

• Pros:
• Polyglot / TypeScript: Allows writing infrastructure in the same language as the application, enabling shared logic.
• Conceptual Alignment: I agree with the core philosophy that "declarative" does not strictly require a configuration language (JSON/YAML/HCL). As argued in Nobody Knows What Declarative Is, general-purpose code can be declarative.
• Cons:
• Provider Maturity: While Pulumi can bridge Terraform providers, there is often a lag or friction compared to using the native Terraform provider directly. My previous experience (circa 2 years ago) involved missing features in the AWS provider, and while the gap has closed, Terraform remains the "source of truth" for provider capabilities.

Consequences

Pros

• Agentic Optimization: Terraform's HCL is the ubiquitious industry standard. Coding agents understand it extremely well due to the massive volume of public examples. This outweighs the desire for TypeScript-based IaC.
• Skill Synergy: I use Terraform extensively in production systems at work. Using it here reinforces those skills and keeps my personal and professional toolchains aligned ("upskilling feeds both ways").
• Stability: My experience with Pulumi has been limited to side projects, whereas my Terraform experience is battle-tested in production.
• Simplicity: HCL is simple. The true complexity of IaC lies in understanding the cloud provider's resources (e.g., DNS record parameters), which is a constant regardless of the tool.

Cons

• Domain-Specific Language: Requires writing HCL instead of TypeScript.
• Lower Level: More verbose than some of Pulumi's high-level abstractions.