Pulumi, a platform for infrastructure-as-code, has announced native support for HashiCorp Terraform and OpenTofu, marking a significant shift in its strategy. The company, previously known for its exclusive use of general-purpose programming languages, will now allow users to execute HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) directly through the Pulumi engine and host Terraform state within Pulumi Cloud. This update, currently in private beta, aims to address the challenge of migrating legacy code and provide a unified platform for managing different infrastructure tools.
The move is seen as a response to IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp and related licensing changes, which have unsettled some organizations. Pulumi’s CEO, Joe Duffy, acknowledged the reality of mixed-tool environments in modern enterprise infrastructure and stated that the company is not “dogmatic about languages” and will add support for other languages as market demand grows. The technical implementation involves two distinct capabilities: Pulumi Cloud serving as a state backend and management plane for Terraform and OpenTofu, and the Pulumi CLI supporting HCL as a first-class language.
This allows teams to maintain HCL codebases while utilizing Pulumi’s orchestration capabilities, enabling a polyglot architecture where platform teams can build complex components in one language and consume them using simple HCL modules. The announcement clarifies that this capability is not a “bolt-on” addition, but rather offers HCL users full access to the entirety of the Pulumi ecosystem, including thousands of providers.
To incentivize migration, Pulumi introduced a financial “escape hatch” program, which enables customers to apply credits equivalent to their remaining HashiCorp contract value towards Pulumi usage. This aims to alleviate the financial burden of running parallel systems during the transition period. The infrastructure-as-code market remains highly competitive, with HashiCorp Terraform as the industry standard and other competitors like Crossplane and OpenTofu gaining traction. By integrating HCL and Terraform state, Pulumi is positioning itself as a unifying platform that can manage competitive formats, reducing operational friction and providing a single platform for managing different infrastructure tools. The general availability of this update is expected in Q1 2026.