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Providers

The term "provider" can mean different things in different contexts. When we talk about Pulumi programs, we often talk about provider resources such as that provided by the aws.Provider class in the @pulumi/aws NodeJS/TypeScript package. Or, we might simply mean a cloud provider, such as AWS or GCP. In the context of the wider Pulumi architecture though, a provider (specifically, a resource provider) is a Pulumi plugin that implements a standardized gRPC interface for handling communication with a third-party service (usually a cloud service, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure):

• Configuration methods are designed to allow a consumer to configure a provider instance in some way. The call is the most common example of this, allowing a caller to e.g. specify the AWS region that a provider should operate in. is a similar method that operates at a higher level, allowing a caller to influence more deeply how a provider works (see the section on parameterized providers for more).
• Schema endpoints allow a caller to interrogate the resources and functions that a provider exposes. The method returns a provider's schema, which includes the set of resources and functions that the provider supports, as well as the properties and inputs that each resource and function expects. This is the primary driver for the various code generation processes that Pulumi uses, such as that underpinning SDK generation.
• Lifecycle methods expose the typical , , , and (CRUD) operations that allow clients to manage provider resources. The , , and methods also fall into this category, as discussed in resource registration.
• Functions can be invoked on a provider through the call, or on specific resources by using the operation. Functions are typically used to perform operations that don't fit into the CRUD model, such as retrieving a list of availability zones, or available regions, etc.

While any program which implements the interface can be interfaced with by the Pulumi engine, in practice most Pulumi providers are built in a handful of ways:

• Bridged providers wrap a Terraform provider using the Pulumi Terraform bridge. The majority of Pulumi providers are built in this way.
• The pulumi-go-provider library provides a high-level API for writing a provider in Go, without having to worry about low-level gRPC details.
• Dynamic providers can be written as part of a Pulumi program. They are discussed in more detail in their own section of this documentation.
• Each language SDK provides a provider package that offers low-level primitives for writing a provider in that language (e.g. gh-file:pulumi#sdk/nodejs/provider for NodeJS, gh-file:pulumi#sdk/python/lib/pulumi/provider for Python, and gh-file:pulumi#sdk/go/pulumi/provider for Go). These packages are in varying states of completeness and neatness and are generally only used for building component providers.

A provider binary is typically named pulumi-resource-<provider-name>; pulumi-resource-aws is one example. The following pages provide more information on the various types of providers, their modes of operation, and their implementation:

:::{toctree} :maxdepth: 1 :titlesonly:

/docs/architecture/providers/built-in /docs/architecture/providers/default /docs/architecture/providers/components /docs/architecture/providers/dynamic /docs/architecture/providers/parameterized /docs/architecture/providers/implementers-guide :::