Matt Ellis

We’ve had a 1st class concept of encrypted secrets configuration ever since first releasing Pulumi. Customers have told us they love having such a simple and easy way to ensure safe management of tokens, database passwords, and more. Since launching, however, we’ve also heard that you’d like more control over encryption and to see this protection expanded to cover not just configuration, but all of the secret data within their Pulumi deployments.

To support this, we’ve added two new features to Pulumi in our latest 0.17.12 release:

• Automatic tracking of secret values throughout a Pulumi program to ensure that all such values are always encrypted in the resulting state, no matter how they are used.
• A new option to use custom client-side encryption, instead of the default of using the Pulumi backend for encryption, to have full control over the secrets encryption and decryption.

Together, these features provide you with complete control over how secrets are managed within Pulumi deployments. We have worked with customers with advanced security and compliance needs while developing this feature, enabling them to use our online hosted SaaS with even greater confidence.

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At Pulumi, we do all of our development on GitHub, with a workflow built around topic branches. When a developer wants to make a change, they push a branch to GitHub, open a pull request and (in theory) once it’s merged, delete the branch. In practice, we’ll often forget to delete the topic branch (I’m probably the worst offender), which means we end up having topic branches linger on our main repository until they are explicitly cleaned up. While it’s a lot of fun to go a click through the GitHub UI from time to time, deleting merged branches, it’s even more fun to build automation to do this for us. Since GitHub has a rich set of webhooks and Pulumi makes it easy to write serverless functions, it felt like it would be natural to use Pulumi to write a hook that would clean up branches after a pull request got merged. In addition, Pulumi lets us leverage real programming languages to build abstractions, which means we can build a simple framework that hides much of the ceremony behind defining a hook and lets us focus on the core logic of our hook, without worrying about how it is deployed and managed.

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