Names & terminology

This is the canonical reference for Pulumi product names, features, and categories, as well as the names we no longer use. It’s here to help us keep our naming (and the automated processes around it) consistent.

Some replacements can’t be automated. “Pulumi Service” resolves to a different product in different sentences — Pulumi Cloud most often, but Pulumi ESC or Pulumi Deployments where the sentence is about secrets or remote execution. Replacements like these may need a human to specify the right one.
Historical usage is fine. Prose that intentionally describes past behavior — “before v3.0 this was called X” — is acceptable, and dated blog posts should remain as they are.

For voice, tone, and word choice, see voice and tone and writing style.

Product names

Always capitalize product names exactly as they are here.

Name	Notes
Pulumi IaC	The practice of IaC is infrastructure as code, lowercase.
Pulumi Cloud	The commercial cloud product. Its web frontend is the Pulumi Cloud console or the Pulumi console, with console in lowercase, since it isn’t a proper noun. Never Pulumi UI.
Pulumi ESC	Expands to Environments, Secrets, and Configuration.
Pulumi Neo	Our infrastructure agent. Neo is also acceptable.
Pulumi Deployments	Deployments is also acceptable.
Pulumi Discovery	Peer of Pulumi Policies under Discovery & governance.
Pulumi Policies	A singular proper noun, like United States: “Pulumi Policies enforces compliance”, never “enforce” in this context.
Pulumi IDP	The concept of an IDP is internal developer platform, lowercase.
Pulumi CLI	In prose, the Pulumi CLI.
Pulumi SDK	In prose, the Pulumi SDK.
Pulumi Kubernetes Operator	In prose, the Pulumi Kubernetes Operator. May be abbreviated as PKO after an initial on-page mention.

Expand product names on first mention (“Pulumi ESC”), then use just the product name (“ESC”) afterward. Similarly, for non-Pulumi acronyms, spell out the acronym on first use, then use the abbreviation (e.g., “Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)”, then just “VPC”). Widely known acronyms (API, HTTP, REST) don’t need explanation.

Features and capabilities

Two rules decide the casing of every name on this page:

Features and capabilities are always lowercase: drift detection and remediation, review stacks, scheduled deployments, secrets rotation. Exceptions, if any, are rare, and noted below.
Where a proper noun is followed by a common noun describing what it is, capitalize only the proper part: the Pulumi Cloud console, the Resources view, a Discovery scan.

Pulumi has no title-case convention: headings are sentence case, and names keep their own casing wherever they appear.

Pulumi IaC

Automation API: A feature, but capitalized to distinguish it from the generic concept of automation. In prose, the Automation API.
Pulumi package: A component or provider shipped with a plugin and consumable in any Pulumi language. A native language package is the single-language counterpart.
Pulumi Cloud provider: The provider for managing Pulumi Cloud resources. The registry package is still published as pulumiservice, so it’s referenced in code as such.

Pulumi Deployments

Drift detection: Drift remediation is the action it enables, and is also lowercase.
Review stacks: Ephemeral stacks created for pull requests.
Click-to-deploy: The one-click deployment flow for templates and examples.
Time-to-live stacks: Stacks that are destroyed automatically. May be abbreviated as TTL stacks after an initial on-page mention.
Scheduled deployments, deployment triggers, webhooks, and Pulumi-managed and customer-managed runners are all lowercase.

Pulumi ESC

Environments: Always lowercase (create an environment, ESC environments, duplicating environments, and so on).
Login providers: The identity providers an environment authenticates against.
Dynamic credentials, dynamic secrets, rotated secrets and secrets rotation, composable environments, revisions, and tags are all lowercase.

Discovery & governance

Discovery & governance is a category label that covers two products, Discovery and Policies. When used alone, Discovery is a product name, unless it’s being used to describe the concept of discovering. So it’s Discovery scans your cloud accounts, and when the discovery is complete. Governance, as a concept, is always lowercase.

Discovery’s features are all lowercase as well: resource search, unified resources, data export, discovered stacks, and visual import. A scan is a scan or a Discovery scan, the inventory is the resource graph or the Discovery inventory, and what it surfaces are discovered resources or unmanaged resources.
Policies have policy packs, policy groups, and policy findings. Compliance frameworks (CIS, NIST, PCI DSS) and enforcement modes (preventative and audit) are all lowercase.

Pulumi Neo

Neo tasks and Neo automations: The units of work that Neo performs.
Neo tokens: The units of Neo usage.
Neo code reviews, MCP integrations, and scheduled tasks are all lowercase.

Pulumi IDP

Product features like services, private registry, private components, organization templates, Terraform modules, no-code stacks, the new-project wizard, and the Backstage plugin are lowercase.
Concepts like golden paths are also lowercase.

Pulumi Cloud

Pulumi Cloud console: The web frontend for Pulumi Cloud. Pulumi console is also acceptable. The Dashboard, as a named view in the console, is capitalized.
Approvals: The deployment-approval feature, lowercase.
Version control accounts: Lowercase and written in full. Version control integrations refers to the feature. VCS accounts and VCS integrations are also acceptable.
Context API: A feature, but capitalized to distinguish it from the generic concept of context.
Pulumi Credits: Capitalized to distinguish it from the concept of a credit (the opposite of a debit). Workflow minutes and Neo tokens, however, are lowercase.
Features within the console, like custom roles, teams, audit logs, and access tokens (including their types: organization, team, machine, and personal) are lowercase. Their named pages, views, and sections, however — the Dashboard, Stacks, Environments, Resources, Deployments — are capitalized.

Retired and disallowed names

The following names are no longer used. Notes may be added to historical content (e.g., blogs) to clarify their updated names so as not to confuse readers.

Don’t use	Use instead	Notes
Insights, Pulumi Insights, Insights Discovery, Account Discovery, IAS	Discovery
Insights & Governance, Insights and Policy, Insights 2.0, Discovery & Governance, Discovery and governance	Discovery & governance	A category label, not a product name, so lowercase, and with ampersand.
CrossGuard, Pulumi CrossGuard, Policy as Code (as a product name), Insights Policy	Pulumi Policies	Policy as code in reference to the practice.
Policy Violations (as the console page name)	policy findings	Lowercase policy violations is fine in prose for what a policy check surfaces.
Insights account	cloud account	Avoid just “account”, as it collides with version control accounts.
Insights scan	scan, Discovery scan
the Insights supergraph	the resource graph, the Discovery inventory
Insights resources	discovered resources, unmanaged resources
Pulumi Service	Pulumi Cloud
Pulumi Service provider (PSP)	Pulumi Cloud provider	The package id remains `pulumiservice`.
Pulumi Console, Pulumi Cloud Console, Pulumi UI	Pulumi console, Pulumi Cloud console	Lowercase console.
Copilot, Pulumi Copilot	Pulumi Neo
public beta	public preview	Use this for anything pre-GA.
cross-language package	Pulumi package
single-language package, language-native package	native language package	Not language-native package.
runtime code	function serialization	Runtime has too many unrelated live meanings to swap on sight.
self-managed backend	DIY backend	This is different from self-hosted (i.e., customer-managed, on-prem) deployments of Pulumi Cloud.

General terminology rules

Don’t overcapitalize. Only proper nouns should be capitalized — not concepts (even Pulumi-specific ones). So for example, it’s stack, not Stack; environment, not Environment; token, not Token; and infrastructure as code, not Infrastructure as Code.
The phrase infrastructure as code is usable as both a noun and an adjective. The noun form (“infrastructure as code is the practice of…”) should never be hyphenated. The adjectival form (“Pulumi is an infrastructure-as-code tool”) may be hyphenated, but typically doesn’t need to be. If the sentence is clear and unambiguous without the hyphens, omit them.
It’s open source when used as a noun (“we love open source”), but open-source when used as an adjective (“Pulumi is an open-source platform”). It’s set up as a verb but setup as a noun; log in as a verb but login as a noun; and command line as a noun but command-line as an adjective.
Cloud and internet are both lowercase, and data center is two words. Frontend and backend are both one word.
Match each project’s own casing for names like Kubernetes, GitHub, and npm. When a lowercase name like npm would land at the start of a sentence, reword so it doesn’t.