Pulumi Blog: Marlowe Fenne

Maximize Business Outcomes In Your Multi-Cloud Environment

Marlowe Fenne — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Overcoming the cost and complexity of multi-cloud environments and managing infrastructure more effectively is a perpetual challenge. For thousands of companies growing Platform Engineering skills, the solution to these challenges may be closer than you think.

Hundreds of thousands of developers across the globe already rely on Pulumi to drive more scalable, repeatable deployments in large self-managed production environments. By combining the power of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with automation, compliance, and robust security within a Pulumi-hosted environment, you can achieve new levels of performance, visibility and security while reducing risk. Here are a few examples:

Speed - Streamlined Operations

Pulumi Cloud accelerates time to market. It automates deployments, manages state, and centralizes secrets, eliminating the complexities of DIY IaC backends. Its transactional state management prevents issues like outages caused by mismanaged state files, offering a secure, reliable platform for scaling operations.

Materialize reduced costs and accelerated time to market by making developer onboarding 75% faster.

Scale - Improved Developer Productivity

By supporting modern programming languages like Python, TypeScript, and Go, Pulumi Cloud allows developers to define infrastructure using familiar tools, speeding up onboarding and simplifying workflows. Predefined policy packs and dynamic secrets further reduce operational overhead.

BMW Group used Pulumi to build a scalable and resilient hybrid cloud implementation that could handle more than eleven thousand developers.

Security - Enhanced Security and Compliance

With features like Pulumi CrossGuard for policy enforcement and Pulumi ESC for centralized secrets management, Pulumi Cloud ensures adherence to security standards like SOC2 and HIPAA. This eliminates the risks associated with improperly stored credentials or manually enforced policies.

Tetrate uses Pulumi ESC to stop secrets sprawl and attain compliance more efficiently.

Savings - Cost Efficiency

Pulumi Cloud’s AI-driven insights identify stale infrastructure and optimize resource use, reducing waste and cutting costs. Its managed service eliminates the need for dedicated backend engineers, freeing resources for core business innovation.

Unity Technologies reduced deployment times by 80%, from weeks to hours, significantly improving their time to market.

By choosing Pulumi Cloud, IT leaders can focus on driving innovation, securing infrastructure, and achieving scalability without the hidden costs and risks of managing IaC backends manually. It’s a comprehensive solution for modern cloud management.

“Pulumi lets us manage multi-cluster Kubernetes infrastructure efficiently, all in one stack. It has hugely benefited productivity and our service’s reliability. Without Pulumi, we know that scaling and maintaining Materialize would be much harder for the team.”

– Paul Hemberger, Engineering Manager for Materialize’s cloud team

Is your team ready to move from a self-managed environment to Pulumi cloud? Explore your options with these resources, and enroll in our workshop series that’s customizable for your cloud and business environment.

Accelerate, Scale and Secure AI Innovation with Pulumi Platform Engineering

Marlowe Fenne — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This post discusses Pulumi Copilot, which Pulumi Neo has replaced. Learn about Neo →

As leadership teams continue to bet big on AI, the tradeoffs between how much to invest and when to expect a reasonable return are ever-present. While exploring scenarios for accelerating this return on investment, organizations are discovering some unique ways to accelerate their AI payback with Platform Engineering.

As innovation and ROI pressures mount, how are savvy tech organizations using Platform Engineering to get more competitive advantage - and perhaps a quantum leap - from their AI investments?

Changing the Rules of the AI Game

Platform Engineering is transforming how organizations automate, secure and manage their resources - particularly in AI environments that require substantial compute, memory and cloud infrastructure.

Save Money on Resources

AI’s wide array of disparate technology resources make it an ideal use case for Platform Engineering. Cloud innovators are unifying AI layers, including web frameworks, LLMs, containers, databases, secrets, policies, and configurations, into streamlined Python libraries. Then they leverage these libraries to efficiently manage infrastructure stacks through code.

For example, platform teams can now manage Google Dialogflow, LangChain Llama and other stacks using one platform, and then repurpose these unified resources across projects. Plus, they can author infrastructure as code, using programming languages they know and love, and write statements to define infrastructure using their own IDE’s, with autocomplete, type checking, and documentation. These teams deliver higher quality projects with fewer errors (and better testing), and are frequently happier, more productive, and more innovative.

With this “work smarter, not harder” approach, there’s also less work, as there’s a lot less code required to run infrastructure. In many cases, code can be consolidated by 50% or more, and it can be leveraged across entire organizations without tedious, error-prone copying and pasting.

All these efficiencies combine to reduce cloud, compute and storage costs, so you can re-invest the savings into more AI innovation and/or more scale across your organization.

Accelerate Time to Market

While speed is a byproduct of these efficiencies, it’s also a key reason to leverage platform engineering for AI. The most recognizable names in the AI industry have many attributes in common, including innovation and speed to market. Many of these leaders leverage Pulumi to achieve this decisive advantage.

Snowflake is a great example of this approach. “There’s no question that, if we had gone down the traditional infrastructure automation route, it would have taken us a week or a week and a half to do one deployment of the cluster, end to end,” said Raman Hariharan, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering. “Plus, that deployment wouldn’t be repeatable, testable or scalable. It would have been a mad scramble to meet our deadline. When we demonstrated to people that what used to take a week and a half now, with [platform engineering], took under a day, they were shocked.” Read the full Snowflake case study here.

Pulumi customers regularly rave about their results with platform engineering - many citing 5 to 10X faster time to market. See more case studies here.

Another benefit: more freedom to innovate with more resources

This speed and efficiency also frees up valuable time for engineering staff to work on the creative new projects that drive innovation and new revenue generating applications. By combining generative AI with Pulumi’s insights and knowledge of your entire cloud infrastructure, users are solving a wide array of next-generation cloud development challenges.

Joren McReynolds, VP of Engineering at Panther Labs said, “We are now in the best position to deliver new innovative solutions to our customers and to do so quickly, which is huge for a startup such as ours that needs to accelerate our efforts and to do so efficiently and seamlessly.”

To make this process even more efficient, a new AI-driven conversational chat interface called Pulumi Copilot is now integrated throughout Pulumi Cloud, enabling users to quickly accomplish a variety of cloud infrastructure management tasks by leveraging the power of large language models plus the rich capabilities of Pulumi Cloud.

“At Unity Aura we manage hundreds of infrastructure updates per day,” said Eilon Ashkenazi, DevOps Engineer at Unity Aura. “With Pulumi Copilot we can improve the development process for the team by delivering working reference examples faster and discovery of resources to identify and update infrastructure in production.”

Dramatically Improve AI Security

Whether it’s cloud settings, API keys, database credentials or VM passwords, AI environments hold a wide variety of secrets, increasing risk, outages, errors and operational friction. Now you can centralize and secure your secrets management using platform engineering best practices within Pulumi. Easily access, share, and manage environments, secrets, and configurations securely on any cloud using your favorite programming languages. Pull and sync with any secrets store, and consume in any application, tool, or CI/CD platform.

Many industry-leading AI technology providers such as Snowflake have already based some of their competitive differentiation on Pulumi’s unique value. More waves of large organizations are following this example as they navigate their journeys to AI time to market and return on investment.

Learn more about how Pulumi and Platform Engineering can help your organization in the same way it helped Snowflake speed up its deployment by 10x. Or take a look at how Aptos Labs achieved 10x faster development cycles.

If you are ready to talk to an expert about how platform engineering can help your organization, click here. For practitioners on your team, here are some events and learning assets to get up to speed quickly on platform engineering and infrastructure as code.

Accelerate Revenue Growth and Time to Market with Platform Engineering

Marlowe Fenne — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With 62% of large organizations already using multi-cloud (Cloud Computing News), business leaders are looking for their next competitive advantage. Finding these next-gen business edges can be a real challenge, but some innovative organizations are discovering that time to market can be a big competitive lever. They are accelerating their development cycles by up to 70% and seizing opportunities to build new markets, establish new brands and capture market share. This Time To Market (TTM) advantage can apply to entire markets as well as any aspect of your product or service connected to the cloud.

Gaining these big advantages means solving some big challenges. In most cases, development cycles are expanding as software gets more complex. “It’s a study in entropy, and it is not getting any more simple,” said “DevOps for Dummies” author Emily Freeman (SiliconAngle). Factor in multi-cloud infrastructure factors such as different programming languages (C#, Python, Java, .NET, GO, YAML), policies and authentication, and the magnitude of these challenges becomes very real.

Underpinning these challenges are how organizations approach their software development lifecycle (SDLC), multi-cloud infrastructure, security policies and more. Collectively, these factors dramatically affect time to market and how companies handle all of the preceding laundry list of challenges around the complexity of cloud deployments. When organizations evolve their processes and business models toward faster, smarter, more streamlined release cycles, they gain TTM advantage and that profound business edge over competitors.

So, how are these organizations getting there?

More speed and scale with Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering is becoming a business essential for cloud-first companies: “The Platform engineering team typically sits between operations and more IT-centric folks and developers, and their goals are to be a center of excellence, establish best practices, put in place the systems that enable the organization to scale, and ultimately empower the rest of the organization to ship faster with confidence, compliance, cost control - all the things necessary for a modern enterprise to go to the cloud,” said Joe Duffy, CEO and Founder of Pulumi.

Good platform engineering is a method of handling all platform deployments, rollbacks, load balancing and operations in a consistent, centralized manner that is programmatic and can be controlled and directed by the engineering organization. A robust platform engineering solution helps the organization to solve its complex cloud issues, including those around deployment, testing, policy and security. Great platform engineering becomes a secret weapon that some cloud-first organizations are using to outmaneuver and disrupt their competitors.

When DevOps, infrastructure and product delivery teams are working together in one seamless platform - using their favorite languages across all their stacks, they’re faster, happier, and more productive, which means faster development cycles and faster TTM. They deliver new features, new services and new products more quickly than competitors, and adjust and make needed changes faster, adapting to market changes and conditions more quickly.

Aptos Labs is a blockchain and Web3 technology leader that’s leveraged this approach very well. “Switching to Pulumi for our IaC needs helped us massively accelerate development velocity, while upgrading the security, compliance, and cost control policies,” said Christian Thielemann, Software Engineer.

As more organizations recognize its business transformation value, platform engineering is becoming a strategic differentiator. For example 4IR, a technology provider for manufacturing and IOT industries, said, “[platform engineering] has emerged as a key element in our strategy, creating tangible value for us by reducing infrastructure deployment time, up-skilling our team, and accelerating our time to market.”

How Platform Engineering delivers business value

Platform engineering allows organizations to improve productivity by removing bottlenecks around configuring cloud architectures, provisioning, testing and deployment. It improves security and compliance by setting up guardrails to enforce policy and security, preventing costly issues that can significantly delay or stop product deployment. By automating these necessary parts of cloud deployment, and enabling control and the ability to deliver consistency and repeatability, platform engineering makes your platform team and development teams faster, more efficient and improves their ability to work together.

Platform engineering tools deliver the ability for your platform team to program and control all aspects of the platform on which your software will run. You can manage deployment, scaling, provisioning, testing and more using code that you control and can manage and improve. That means predictability and the ability to fine control all of your platforms. The better platform engineering tools work with a range of cloud platforms and can be integrated into your existing toolset very easily.

All of these specific advantages mean that platform engineering delivers profound improvements in deployment times, testing times and provisioning leading to reductions of 70% or more in time to market. Snowflake, one of the largest cloud data warehouses, used by a large percentage of the Fortune 500, saw an improvement in deployment time from one and a half weeks to less than a day.

Effectively, platform engineering does the following things to deliver faster time to market and faster revenue growth:

Solves a whole set of TTM issues and problems
Simultaneous benefits to DevOps, engineering and the business
Faster development cycles
Reduces cloud complexity and cost and inefficiency
Better adherence to policy and security

Platform engineering results also vary widely by company due to multiple factors. While 75% of participants in a recent Gartner survey said their organizations had adopted platform engineering, only 44% had formalized their approach. Plus, some solutions are more agile and flexible than others. “When we did it with Terraform, it took two weeks to do [infrastructure deployments]. Now we do it in about three hours a day. So that’s how much of an improvement Pulumi gave us on our deployment time,” said Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Starburst Data.

To find out more about how platform engineering can help you, take a look at these case studies:

Aptos Labs uses Pulumi to transform development, increasing velocity by up to 10x while improving security, compliance, and cost control.
4IR uses Pulumi to reduce infrastructure deployment times, up-skill its team, and accelerate time to market.
Starburst Data uses Pulumi to reduce infrastructure deployments from 2 weeks to just 3 hours.

If you are ready to talk to an expert about how platform engineering can help your organization, click here.