Sophia Parafina

Delivering modern applications is complicated and requires the coordination of many moving parts. Applications are frequently updated to implement new features and improve security and performance, translating to a better user experience for your customers. To further complicate matters, infrastructure must also be deployed and maintained simultaneously with applications to avoid conflicts or dependencies.

Containerized applications deployed on Kubernetes are particularly susceptible to a misalignment between developers who frequently push changes and operators who want to maintain a stable architecture. Continuous Integration builds and tests software and delivers it as packages. Continuous Delivery or Deployment deploys applications on infrastructure. Let’s take a look at how we can accomplish CI/CD for both applications and infrastructure.

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“Why use a programming language to build and maintain infrastructure?” is a question we hear frequently. There are apparent advantages such as using a mature and well-known language across a team, enabling cloud engineers to use software development best practices, and an ecosystem of tools for building robust systems.

Infrastructure as code enables you to build tools and environments to automate routine tasks, letting cloud engineers concentrate on efficiency and resilience. In this article, we’ll take a look at how Pulumi’s Automation API lets you build custom ops tooling that improves your workflow.

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It’s a new year and it’s time to level up your cloud engineering skills. Pulumi is there to get you started on your cloud engineering journey with workshops and technical sessions.

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Amazon announced several Elastic Kubernetes Service feature releases and updates during the first week of AWS re:Invent 2020. If we look at all the announcements as a whole, we can see the Kubernetes ecosystem maturing to make deployments and management easier for organizations. Let’s take a look at how they can benefit your use of EKS.

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There are many moving parts when deploying infrastructure and applications. Playbooks are step-by-step maps that standardize how infrastructure and applications are deployed across your organization. Typically playbooks describe every action to build and deploy, requiring an operator to complete each step before moving on to the next. It’s a process that can be tedious and prone to human error.

What if you could encapsulate a playbook into a single action? This is the promise of declarative infrastructure. You declare the desired state of your infrastructure and the infrastructure as code engine builds the infrastructure. However, you must still deploy the application and perform maintenance, and this is where you hit the limits of templating languages and where programming languages excel. In this hands-on article, we’ll demonstrate how to use Pulumi’s Automation API to create a program that builds infrastructure, installs an application, and can perform application maintenance.

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If you could create infrastructure without using a cloud provider’s console, a CLI, or a templating engine, what would you build? Pulumi’s Automation API lets you create declarative infrastructure defined by your best practices and expose it behind a REST, gRPC, or custom API.

So just what is Automation API? Think of it as Pulumi’s infrastructure as code engine as an SDK. Instead of writing code and using the CLI to declare infrastructure, you can directly tell the engine to build your infrastructure. This means that you’re using the same declarative IaC tooling with the predictability, robustness, safety, and desired state management, except it has a new programmatic surface area. Imagine building an application that creates infrastructure via a REST interface. Get ready, because that’s what we’re going to do.

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This article demonstrates how to deploy and provision a virtual machine in Azure using the Pulumi Azure-Native provider. While there are numerous examples of using the Azure console, the Azure CLI, or ARM templates to deploy and provision virtual machines, we’ll use Python to implement a repeatable deployment.

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Policies protect your infrastructure by controlling access, set limits that reduce the blast radius of an incident, and manage infrastructure operations. Policies are commonly created through a form on a cloud provider’s administrative console, making replicating or versioning the policy more difficult. With Policy as Code, you can apply software engineering practices such as automated testing, deployment, and version control when creating policies.

CrossGuard is Pulumi’s Policy as Code solution that lets you create, verify, apply, and enforce policies. Policies are standalone packages that can be run against any Pulumi stack. That means your policies are language agnostic and work with any language supported by Pulumi. Policy Packages are policy bundles that evaluate every resource in your stack, whether deployed in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Kubernetes.

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In software development, an anti-pattern is defined as an apparent solution that has unintended or negative consequences. The other side of anti-patterns is that they also offer solutions. Let’s look at container and Kubernetes anti-patterns and how to avoid them with infrastructure as code.

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Your application made it out of the dev stage, passed the testing stage, and arrived in production. As a developer, you might think that it’s an ops problem now. However, DevOps is a collaborative effort between developers and operators to build and maintain applications using shared techniques and processes, often called “Day 2” activities.

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