Pulumi.. from IaC tool to cloud engineering platform

What is Pulumi?

Pulumi is an open source infrastructure as code tool for creating, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructure. It works with traditional infrastructure like VMs, networks, and databases, in addition to modern architectures, including containers, Kubernetes clusters, and serverless functions. This tool supports dozens of public, private, and hybrid cloud service providers.

From IaC tool to cloud engineering platform

Infrastructure as code outfit Pulumi is rebranding its infra product as a cloud engineering platform that lets teams build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications and infrastructure in a language familiar to them (as long as it is Node.js, Python, Go and .NET).

Offering language options is something Pulumi has zeroed in on over the years, largely to stand out against main competitor HashiCorp Terraform. Terraform has seen a lot of interest as one of the first infrastructure as code tools on the market, but needs users to be fluent in either JSON or the company’s HCL language, which is a barrier to entry for some.

In version 3.0, Pulumi pushed the idea of using “your language” forward by introducing multi-language components, which can be authored in any of the supported languages and consumed in another, making it easier to share best practices between different teams in an organization To help with the distribution, Pulumi Packages have been crafted and provide a way of packaging and distributing libraries to manage infrastructure resources. 

Packages can be created via native providers, which are available for Kubernetes, Azure and Google Cloud and provide native cloud access, multi-language components, custom development, or indeed Terraform CRUD.

Pulumi 3.0

Pulumi was one of the first of what is now a growing number of infrastructure as code startups and on April 20, the company has launched version 3.0 of its cloud engineering platform. With 70 new features and about 1,000 improvements since version 2.0, this is Pulumi’s biggest release yet.

The new release includes features that range from support for Google Cloud as an infrastructure provider (now in preview) to a new Automation API that turns Pulumi into a library that can then be called from other applications. It basically allows developers to write tools that, for example, can then provision and configure their own infrastructure for each customer of a SaaS application, for example.

Also new is support for Pulumi’s CI/CD Assistant across all the company’s paid plans. This feature makes it easier to deploy cloud infrastructure and applications through more than a dozen popular CI/CD platforms, including the likes of AWS Code Service, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Google Cloud Build, Jenkins, Travis CI and Spinnaker. Until now, you needed to be on a Team Pro or Enterprise plan to use this, but it’s now available to all paying users.

The last stable version is 3.3.1, that it was released on may 25 for Linux, macOS and Windows. You can check the improvements and bug fixes here.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) can help your organization deliver products at a faster rate and with more efficiency by improving the development environment. Setting up IaC environment, however, is not an easy job, that’s why at SouthLights, we provide the most experienced teams to perform these tasks. Contact us and start setting up your IaC environment now.

Source: devclass , techcrunch