I hope Pulumi eventually develops a "bare-metal" mode. I'm very much in favor of using a real programming language to set up systems[0], but I don't like to use cloud services beyond basic hosting. It would be nicer if Pulumi provided, as a library, code to launch and maintain self-hosted databases, proxies, etc, rather than just providing clients for cloud APIs.
I believe those are libraries for using these services (e.g., connecting to them and allocating resources inside them), not launching them and setting them up.
[0] http://catern.com/progsys.html