HCP

Pulumi announced that this greatly expands the scope of its platform.

This strategic shift marks a significant change for the company, which has been known for its exclusive advocacy. This update introduces the ability to execute HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) directly through the Pulumi engine and supports hosting Terraform's state in Pulumi Cloud.

These features are currently in private testing and are expected to be officially released in the first quarter of 2026. They address the ongoing challenge of migrating legacy code by allowing engineering teams to run existing projects in parallel with new deployments. This initiative specifically targets organizations that feel uneasy due to related licensing changes, providing a unified platform that reduces the operational conflicts typically encountered when switching infrastructure tools.

As stated in the announcement, Pulumi's founder and CEO Joe Duffy acknowledged the reality of mixed tool environments in modern enterprise infrastructure. He pointed out that while many organizations prefer modern approaches, they often retain investments in old tools over the years. Duffy stated, "We are not dogmatic about languages; we love all languages." "The L in HCL and YAML stands for 'language,' and we have always maintained an 'open to all' attitude. Once we see sufficient market demand for a certain language, we will add it. Well, the time for HCL has come."

The technical implementation involves two distinct functionalities. First, Pulumi Cloud can now serve as the state backend and management plane for HashiCorp Terraform Cloud, directly competing with it. This integration provides visibility, governance, and access to resources without worrying about what the underlying infrastructure tool is.

Second, the Pulumi CLI now supports HCL as a first-class language. This allows the engine to use the Terraform bridge to access providers to interpret HCL code. Unlike previous conversion tools that translated HCL into languages like TypeScript or Python, this feature allows teams to maintain HCL codebases while leveraging Pulumi's orchestration capabilities. This enables platform teams to build complex components in Go or Python, which can then be consumed by other teams using simple HCL modules, creating a multi-language architecture.

The announcement clarified that this feature is not a "bolt-on" capability. Instead, it provides HCL users with full access to the entire Pulumi ecosystem, including thousands of providers, just like any other supported language.

To further incentivize migration, Pulumi has launched a program that allows customers to use points equivalent to the remaining value of their HashiCorp contracts for Pulumi usage, aimed at alleviating the financial burden of running parallel systems during the transition The competition in the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) market remains fierce. HashiCorp Terraform continues to be the industry standard for declarative infrastructure, while the Linux Foundation's OpenTofu has gained attention as an open-source alternative following HashiCorp's shift to a commercial source code license. Other competitors, such as Crossplane, offer control plane approaches to infrastructure management. By integrating HCL and Terraform state, Pulumi positions itself not only as an alternative but also as a unified platform capable of managing competing formats