Engin Diri

Engin Diri

Customer Experience Architect

How to Build an Internal Developer Platform: Strategy, Best Practices, and Self-Service Infrastructure

How to Build an Internal Developer Platform: Strategy, Best Practices, and Self-Service Infrastructure

Welcome to the first post in our IDP Best Practices series. In this guide, we’ll walk through the strategic foundations for designing an Internal Developer Platform that empowers developers without sacrificing governance, security, or operational control.

At Pulumi, we’ve worked with hundreds of teams facing the same core challenge: How do you give developers the infrastructure access they need, while maintaining the governance and security your organization requires?

That tension is at the heart of every IDP conversation. Teams want to move faster and innovate, but also need to stay compliant, control costs, and maintain operational stability.

The good news? You can do both, with a clear strategy and the right approach. This series shares proven best practices for designing, building, and scaling IDPs using Pulumi.

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Backstage vs Pulumi IDP: Why Infrastructure-First Wins!

Backstage vs Pulumi IDP: Why Infrastructure-First Wins!

Developers are losing days every month to infrastructure bottlenecks, compliance hurdles, and inconsistent environments. Platform engineering promised to fix that, yet too many platforms fail before they deliver real impact.

In this comparison of Backstage vs Pulumi IDP, we’ll explore why choosing the right architectural approach matters more than the tool itself.

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I Tried Jenkins in 2025 with Pulumi: Here's How It Went

I Tried Jenkins in 2025 with Pulumi: Here's How It Went

It’s funny how technology has a way of sneaking back into your life just when you think you’ve moved on for good. Jenkins and I have quite the history. Think of it as that reliable but slightly temperamental friend from your college days who you haven’t seen in years.

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Introducing the Pulumi Puluminaries 2.0 Program

Introducing the Pulumi Puluminaries 2.0 Program

We are excited to announce the Pulumi Puluminaries 2.0 Program. This is a fresh and revitalized way to celebrate and support Pulumi’s most passionate community members. Pulumi Puluminaries are individuals who demonstrate leadership in the Pulumi ecosystem by sharing best practices, creating valuable content, and helping fellow practitioners succeed.

Before we dive into what is new, we want to recognize and applaud the incredible achievements of our existing Pulumi Puluminaries. You can check out the great folks currently making a difference in our community on the Pulumi Puluminaries page. Their hard work and dedication have laid a strong foundation for what is next.

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Run DeepSeek-R1 on AWS EC2 Using Ollama

Run DeepSeek-R1 on AWS EC2 Using Ollama

This weekend, my “for you” page on all of my social media accounts was filled with only one thing: DeepSeek. DeepSeek really managed to shake up the AI community with a series of very strong language models like DeepSeek R1.

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Kubernetes Best Practices I Wish I Had Known Before

Kubernetes Best Practices I Wish I Had Known Before

Kubernetes has undeniably transformed the way we build, ship, and run applications. But let’s be honest, getting started with Kubernetes can feel like climbing Mount Everest in flip-flops.

As a cloud-native citizen and Kubernetes enthusiast, I’ve learned the hard way that there are a bunch of “wish I had known that earlier” best practices. They could have saved me time, money, and headaches.

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Master Kubernetes Secrets with Pulumi ESC + Secrets Store CSI Driver

Master Kubernetes Secrets with Pulumi ESC + Secrets Store CSI Driver

Welcome to the second blog post of the Pulumi ESC and Kubernetes secrets series. If you haven’t had the chance to read the first blog post, go ahead and read it here.

In the previous blog post, we have learned how to manage secrets with Pulumi ESC and the External Secrets Operator. While the External Secrets Operator is a great tool to manage secrets in a cloud-native way, it still creates Kubernetes secrets in the cluster. Depending on your security requirements, you might want to avoid the use of Kubernetes secrets in your cluster at all. This is the point where you hit the limits of the External Secrets Operator.

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YAML, Terraform, Pulumi: What’s the Smart Choice for Deployment Automation with Kubernetes?

YAML, Terraform, Pulumi: What’s the Smart Choice for Deployment Automation with Kubernetes?

YAML and Kubernetes go together like peanut butter and jelly. While Kubernetes objects can be defined in JSON, YAML has emerged as the de facto standard.

It’s often the first tool developers encounter when diving into Kubernetes, and for good reason - its human-readable format makes it the preferred choice in most tutorials, documentation, and even production deployments.

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How Secrets Sprawl is Slowing You Down—And What to Do About It.

How Secrets Sprawl is Slowing You Down—And What to Do About It.

Only a few things are certain in the lives of developers and DevOps engineers: taxes, yearly performance reviews, and secret sprawl. While the first two are inevitable, the last one is something that can be managed.

As we keep adding new cloud resources and releasing new applications, the number of secrets we need to manage keeps growing: passwords, API keys, certificates, and more. And as if this isn’t enough, we need to manage secrets across different systems and environments with different teams that need to access them; we end up with duplicates.

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