Is there any work on developing a "bare-metal" mode for Pulumi? I'm very much in favor of using a real programming language to set up systems, but I don't like to use cloud services beyond hosting. It would be nice if Pulumi provided, as a library, code to launch and maintain self-hosted databases, proxies, etc, rather than just clients for cloud APIs. Something that could be used as an alternative to Ansible. Or are there any alternatives to Pulumi that support such a "bare-metal" mode?

That wouldn't be a mode, just a provider. For example, Equinix Metal already has a provider.

Right, bare metal cloud services are already supported, but I'm talking about configuring things on a specific machine, e.g. creating config files. So there wouldn't be an API, as such...

There would be a provider doing the work, which is essentially an API. A big difficulty would be that in other providers, you log in using one set of creds then configuring any number of resources. For configuring machines, you'd need new creds for each machine, so essentially a different provider for each machine.