Using Go Generics with Pulumi

March 15th, 2022… just two weeks ago. The Go team released Go 1.18 to the world. What seems like a trivial point release actually brings a huge new feature to the Go language: Generics.

In this article, I want to show you how you can use this new feature to build a great developer experience with your abstractions for your Pulumi programs.

Using Go 1.18

The first thing you need to do is ensure you have Go 1.18 installed. You can run go version to check. If you see anything less than 1.18, you’ll need to go upgrade first. The second thing you need to do is update the go.mod in your Pulumi program to specify 1.18 as the minimum version.

go 1.18

Once you’ve done these two steps, you’re ready to start using generics in your Pulumi programs.

Using Generics

Let’s start by asking a question. What is a good use-case for generics? In my experience, generics work really well for allowing us to provide a common interface to our consumers (developers using our APIs) that allows them to use that same interface to accomplish a collection of similar tasks that require different implementations.

For example, let’s assume we want to provide a platform to our developers and allow them to install ANY Kubernetes resource. Our goal is to provide an AddComponent method that they can call to install either pre-supported components, components created by the platform team, or their own custom components. The glue and important aspect here is that all these components conform to the same interface.

Defining The Interface

In the simplest form, we just need an Install function to call that returns either an error or an array of Pulumi resources.

type Component interface {
    Install(ctx *pulumi.Context, name string) ([]pulumi.Resource, error)
}

Creating our Components

Now we need to provide a component that satisfies this interface. So let’s assume that we want to install nginx. First, we create a struct that contains fields for any points of configuration. For today’s example, we’ll just request the version to be installed and a name; the name being used to ensure if the component is installed more than once, it can be uniquely identified.

type Nginx struct {
	Version string
}

func (c *Nginx) Install(ctx *pulumi.Context, name string) ([]pulumi.Resource, error) {
    return []
}

From there, we can begin to flesh out the Install implementation for nginx.

func (c *Nginx) Install(ctx *pulumi.Context) ([]pulumi.Resource, error) {
	deployment, err := appsv1.NewDeployment(ctx, name, &appsv1.DeploymentArgs{
		Metadata: &metav1.ObjectMetaArgs{
			Labels: pulumi.StringMap{
				"app": pulumi.String(name),
			},
		},
		Spec: &appsv1.DeploymentSpecArgs{
			Replicas: pulumi.Int(3),
			Selector: &metav1.LabelSelectorArgs{
				MatchLabels: pulumi.StringMap{
					"app": pulumi.String(name),
				},
			},
			Template: &corev1.PodTemplateSpecArgs{
				Metadata: &metav1.ObjectMetaArgs{
					Labels: pulumi.StringMap{
						"app": pulumi.String(name),
					},
				},
				Spec: &corev1.PodSpecArgs{
					Containers: corev1.ContainerArray{
						&corev1.ContainerArgs{
							Name:  pulumi.String("nginx"),
							Image: pulumi.String(fmt.Sprintf("nginx:%s", c.Version)),
							Ports: corev1.ContainerPortArray{
								&corev1.ContainerPortArgs{
									ContainerPort: pulumi.Int(80),
								},
							},
						},
					},
				},
			},
		},
	})
	if err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}

	return []pulumi.Resource{
		deployment,
	}, nil
}

This is rather contrived, but hopefully you can see the power of using generics as an interface for platform engineering. Our AddComponent implementation for nginx could return a deployment, a service, an ingress with horizontal pod auto-scalers, or any other resource that you want.

Using the Components

Finally, we create our generic function, AddComponent, and start having some fun.

func AddComponent[C Component](ctx *pulumi.Context, name string, component C) ([]pulumi.Resource, error) {
	return component.Install(ctx, name)
}

func main() {
	pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error {
		AddComponent(ctx, "my-nginx", &Nginx{Version: "1.14.2"})

		return nil
	})
}

Now you and your organization can provide a repository of these components for your developers to consume with their platforms.

The possibilities are endless.

Have fun and see you soon! 👋