IaC tool learning for cloud engineers

My 2024 ranking

Why Terraform wins

A Cloud Engineer should understand more than just the syntax. Terraform teaches concepts that transfer directly to other IaC systems:

• Declarative infrastructure
• Providers and resources
• Variables and outputs
• Modules
• State
• Remote state and locking
• plan vs. apply
• Resource dependencies
• Drift
• Importing existing infrastructure
• Secrets management
• CI/CD integration
• Infrastructure testing
• Policy as code

Those concepts are highly transferable even if your future employer uses OpenTofu, Pulumi, or another tool.

What about Pulumi?

Pulumi is arguably the more attractive tool from a software-engineering perspective. Instead of HCL, you can use TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java, etc., giving you normal programming-language features, package managers, IDE tooling and conventional testing frameworks.www.pulumi.com

So I'd choose Pulumi first if you strongly prefer writing infrastructure as conventional software.

But for career ROI, I'd still put Terraform ahead in 2024 because learning Terraform exposed you to the larger established IaC ecosystem.

The 2024-specific answer

If I were starting a Cloud Engineering career in 2024, I'd learn:

Terraform → OpenTofu → AWS/Azure/GCP provider → CI/CD → Kubernetes

And I'd learn enough Pulumi/CDK to understand how they differ.

One particularly useful strategy is to learn Terraform concepts rather than becoming dependent on Terraform itself. OpenTofu deliberately provides a Terraform-compatible migration path, so the HCL/state/provider/module knowledge transfers well.www.linuxfoundation.org+1

Bottom line:

Learn Terraform for the career signal, learn OpenTofu for the open-source future, and learn Pulumi if you want to bring conventional software-engineering practices into IaC.

If your goal is getting hired as a Cloud/DevOps Engineer, I'd prioritize Terraform + AWS + Kubernetes + Docker + GitHub Actions over trying to learn five different IaC tools.