DevOps
Terraform vs Pulumi vs CDK in 2026: What We Actually Use and Why
Three tools that claim to solve the same problem. Here is what the differences actually mean in practice, and when each one makes sense.
The salary line is visible. The total cost is not. Here is the full picture before you open the role.
The typical frame for the make-vs-buy DevOps decision goes like this: a managed DevOps engagement costs X per month, a full-time engineer costs Y per year. If Y divided by 12 is less than X, hire. This calculation is wrong. It ignores six significant costs that do not show up in the comparison.
A strong DevOps hire starts being productive in month three. Before that, they are learning your stack, your deployment patterns, your team's way of working, and building trust with the engineering team. In the first month, you are managing them more than they are managing infrastructure. For a team with pressing infrastructure problems, that three-month ramp is a real cost.
An in-house DevOps engineer who understands your full infrastructure is a single point of human failure. When they take vacation, are sick, or are focused on a project, your DevOps coverage drops to whoever on the team last remembers what the deployment process looks like. When they leave — typically after 18 to 24 months given current market mobility — you restart from zero.
The DevOps problems that cost you money are senior problems. Poorly designed Kubernetes configurations, inefficient cloud spend, security gaps in IAM policies — these require someone who has seen them before and knows how to fix them properly. Junior DevOps engineers are available and affordable. But the problems they leave behind in their first year will cost more to fix than the salary differential would have saved.
A $150,000 base salary carries 25 to 35 percent overhead in employer-side costs: payroll taxes, health insurance, equipment, tools, recruiting fees, and onboarding. The true fully-loaded cost of a $150,000 hire is $190,000 to $200,000 per year before any equity.
A full-time engineer works approximately 220 days per year. Production does not take weekends off. A managed service covering your on-call alerting, runbook execution, and incident response operates continuously. For teams that have experienced a Friday evening outage handled by a developer who does not understand the infrastructure, this gap is not theoretical.
Three tools that claim to solve the same problem. Here is what the differences actually mean in practice, and when each one makes sense.
The CI/CD market has effectively consolidated. Here is what actually differentiates the three main options and which context suits each one.
Single points of human failure are the most common infrastructure risk we see in audits. Here is what they look like when they materialise.
Your engineering leads spend time managing a DevOps hire. Interviews, onboarding, code review, 1:1s, performance conversations. None of that time is available for product work. In a team of 10, one new hire typically absorbs 10 to 15 percent of a senior engineer's working hours for the first six months.
None of this means hiring is always wrong. For teams above 50 engineers, a dedicated DevOps function is usually the right answer. For teams with compliance requirements that constrain who can access their infrastructure, a managed service may not fit. For teams that want to build internal capability over several years, hiring develops that capability in a way that outsourcing does not.
The decision framework is simpler than it seems: if your infrastructure problems are consistent, predictable, and you have the management bandwidth to ramp someone properly, hire. If your problems are intermittent, changing, or urgent, and the ramp cost would hurt you, a managed engagement is the lower-risk starting point.
Written by
Khaled Kayyali
Co-Founder & CEO
AWS Certified Solutions Architect with 10+ years across software development, cloud infrastructure, and IT leadership. Leads cloud architecture and DevOps strategy for funded startups and scaling companies across MENA and global markets.
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