Pulumi Blog: Company

2024 Year in Review: Growth, Innovation and Appreciation

Sara Huddleston — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 06:11:09 +0000

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

It’s the end of 2024, and like everyone, we’re counting down until 2025 while looking back at our year. We’ve had a very exciting year, from unveiling a bold new vision for Pulumi to delivering cutting-edge updates across our Pulumi Cloud.

Here’s a look at how Pulumi has grown, evolved, and continued empowering teams worldwide.

A Unified Vision: The Pulumi Platform

This year, Pulumi unveiled a bold new vision for Pulumi—a comprehensive product suite that extends far beyond infrastructure as code. The Pulumi platform now consists of three core products:

Pulumi IaC: Open source infrastructure as code in any programming language. With over 100M downloads, 167% growth in contributions, and industry-leading innovations, Pulumi IaC continues to redefine cloud automation.
Pulumi ESC: Centralized secrets management and orchestration that scales. General availability this year brought features like SDKs, versioning, tagging, and integrations with 1Password and Kubernetes secrets operators.
Pulumi Insights: Visibility, intelligence, and control over all infrastructure resources. Insights 2.0 expanded support for resources created outside Pulumi IaC, delivering advanced graph visualizations and policy enforcement powered by Pulumi CrossGuard.

Three core capabilities unite these products:

Pulumi Copilot: Generative AI is used to manage cloud resources.
Pulumi CrossGuard: A policy-as-code engine for compliance and best practices.
Pulumi Deployments: Infrastructure task orchestration.

Over 3,000 customers, including Nvidia, BMW, Unity Games, and Tivity Health, leveraged these solutions to enhance velocity, save costs, and secure their infrastructure.

Highlights of Releases and Enhancements

Pulumi’s product innovations this year have empowered teams to automate, secure, and manage cloud infrastructure with confidence:

Pulumi ESC General Availability, redefining secrets management with features like dynamic credentials and hierarchical environments. New capabilities include secrets syncing with external stores like AWS Secrets Manager and Kubernetes operators for runtime integration.
Pulumi Insights 2.0 delivers AI-powered search, a comprehensive inventory of resources created by Pulumi IaC as well as other tools like Terraform and CloudFormation, and automated remediation capabilities powered by CrossGuard.
Pulumi Copilot leverages Generative AI to transform how teams diagnose and resolve IaC issues, providing instant feedback and deployment recommendations.
Pulumi Kubernetes Operator 2.0 introduced scalable, secure deployments with dedicated workspace pods, enhanced customization options, and improved stability under dynamic conditions.
Drift Detection and Remediation in Pulumi Cloud now automates drift detection for all 180+ supported providers, ensuring infrastructure consistency, enhanced security, and reduced operational risks.
Azure Classic Provider v6.0.0 updates included the latest upstream changes and ensured compatibility with Pulumi Azure Native Provider.
Google Cloud Provider v8.0.0 provides full resource coverage for the latest Google Cloud updates.
AWS CDK 1.0 expands compatibility with AWS CDK features, bridging the CDK and Pulumi ecosystems and enabling integration with constructs from AWS’s construct hub.
Pulumi Visual Studio Code Extension empowers developers with tools for debugging Pulumi programs, YAML language support, and direct ESC management within the IDE.
Pulumi Docker Containers enhances CI/CD workflows with versioned images, pre-installed tools like Poetry and ppm, and runtime flexibility for Python, Node.js, and .NET.

By the Numbers

Pulumi’s growth and impact this year have been amazing:

75,000+ Pull Requests: Driven by 5,600+ contributors.
3,000+ Customers: Empowering industries like AI, gaming, finance, and healthcare.
100M+ Downloads: Pulumi IaC adoption soared globally.
167% Contribution Growth: Outpacing other IaC tools like Terraform and OpenTofu.
71% Cloud Cost Savings: Customers like Tivity Health saved millions with Pulumi.

Community Achievements

Pulumi’s vibrant community has been at the heart of everything we’ve accomplished:

Global Pulumi User Groups (PUGs): With 20 groups across 9 countries, including new meetups in Chicago, Columbus, São Paulo, and Tel Aviv, our community continues to grow. These meetups collectively hosted over 6,396 members.
PulumiUP 2024: Over 8,000 registrants globally, with nearly 1,000 for the first-ever PulumiUP Europe.
Workshops: 72 workshops with 14,500+ registrations from engineers wanting to learn Pulumi.
22,000 GitHub Stars: A testament to our community’s passion and dedication.

Looking Ahead to 2025

To our users, customers, partners, Puluminaries, and employees, “thank you!” Your support has made 2024 an amazing year, and we’re excited for what’s ahead in 2025. Together, we’ll continue to build the future of cloud infrastructure and security.

Stay tuned for more innovations, community events, and collaboration opportunities. Here’s to another year of growth, transformation, and success!

Explore Pulumi ➡️

Announcing the New Pulumi Partner Program

Isaac Harris — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce the launch of the Pulumi Partner Program, a strategic initiative designed to empower our partners and their customers to accelerate cloud projects and achieve faster time-to-market. This program is crafted for cloud and SaaS companies who are building, integrating, and going to market with Pulumi.

Hear from dozens of partners and customers who automate, secure and manage everything in the cloud at PulumiUP on Wednesday, September 18. Register here.

Why the Pulumi Partner Program?

Pulumi has always been committed to the open-source community and the vibrant ecosystem that has grown around our products. With nearly 200 integrations today, our ecosystem is thriving, supported by a network of service partners focused on helping customers succeed. The Pulumi Partner Program is being developed to formalize and strengthen these relationships, allowing us to scale our ability to deliver seamless integrations, co-developed solutions, and collaborative go-to-market activities. By building this program, we aim to empower partners to better support our mutual customers, accelerate cloud adoption, and provide tailored solutions that meet the unique needs of each organization.

Customers are choosing Pulumi because it enables them to manage cloud resources and secrets using familiar general-purpose programming languages like Python, TypeScript, .NET, Java and Go. This approach taps into the existing skills of development teams, reducing the learning curve, and also allows for greater flexibility and reuse of code across projects. By utilizing these widely adopted languages, Pulumi increases team productivity, enables more robust automation, and significantly accelerates the path to production compared to tools that require more restrictive, domain-specific languages. With the introduction of local packages, we’re further simplifying the integration process for partners, facilitating seamless adoption and faster delivery of cloud projects.

Key Benefits of Pulumi Partner Program

Empower Your Customers to deliver cloud initiatives faster using Pulumi’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Secrets Management capabilities. By partnering with Pulumi, your customers gain access to best automation for their cloud projects.
Accelerate Adoption of your solutions through seamless integration with Pulumi. Leverage Pulumi’s support for the world’s most popular programming languages and developer tools to streamline integration, making it easier for your customers to use and adopt your products using familiar languages, tools and process.
Reach More Developers with collaborative documentation, shared examples, and co-marketing initiatives to raise awareness. Participate in joint marketing efforts, including co-branded campaigns and events, to connect with more developers and platform engineers.

With 20 inaugural members, our technology partners join an elite community that benefits from Pulumi’s ongoing investment in technical, marketing, training, and business strategy support. We are excited to welcome new members such as Docker, 1Password, Pinecone, NewRelic, Tailscale, Dagger and many others.

Join the Pulumi Partner Program

We believe that the Pulumi Partner Program will bring together and support the growth of our entire ecosystem, leveraging the strengths of our partners and creating connections for new potential services and technologies. Prospective partners can reach out to us via our website. We look forward to welcoming new partners and driving innovation together.

Celebrating 20,000 Stars: A Milestone for the Pulumi Community

Aaron Kao — Thu, 23 May 2024 18:48:50 +0000

Today, we’re excited to announce that the Pulumi open source project has crossed the incredible milestone of 20,000 stars on GitHub. 🎉 This is a huge achievement, and it wouldn’t have been possible without y’all - our incredible global community of developers.

Since its inception, Pulumi’s vision has been rooted in enabling teams to build and manage modern cloud infrastructure using familiar languages and tools. Over the years, your feedback, contributions, and passion have been invaluable in shaping Pulumi into what it is today. Seeing so many developers embrace our modern approach to cloud infrastructure management is really exciting. We are deeply grateful for the trust y’all have placed in us, and we will continue to push the boundaries in how teams manage cloud infrastructure.

Fueled by Community Contributions

Over the past 7 years, the Pulumi project has had 4,400+ contributors that made 75,000+ pull requests. Pulumi is depended upon by 6,600+ GitHub projects and supports over 160+ packages in the registry. It has been downloaded more than 100 million times by 170,000+ developers. In just the last month, Pulumi has been the most active Infrastructure as Code (IaC) open-source project compared to Terraform or OpenTofu. Pulumi has had 117 merged pull requests (67 TF, 83 OpenTofu), 82 closed issues (49 TF, 54 OpenTofu), and 53 new issues (27 TF, 29, OpenTofu).

Notable Features and Milestones

We also want to take this time to reflect on some of the notable features we shipped that got us here. The Pulumi roadmap is public so we can be transparent about the features being worked on and to encourage deeper collaboration with the community. Here are some of the most popular features that were added to Pulumi over the last 7 years.

Mar 2017 - Pulumi founded
Jun 2018 - Pulumi open source project launched
Aug 2018 - Kubernetes native provider
Oct 2018 - Series A fundraise
Oct 2018 - Pulumi Cloud launched
Nov 2018 - Stack Reference to allow access of outputs of one stack from another
Jun 2019 - AWSX as higher-level components for the AWS platform
Sep 2019 - Pulumi 1.0
Sep 2019 - Transformations to modify the properties and resource options for child resource of a component or stack
Nov 2019 - .NET support
Dec 2019 - CrossGuard for policy as code
Apr 2020 - Pulumi 2.0
May 2020 - Golang support
Sep 2020 - Azure Native Provider for same day access to new Azure features
Oct 2020 - Series B fundraise
Oct 2020 - Automation API exposes IaC through a programmatic interface
Oct 2020 - Import command to import resources not managed by Pulumi into a stack
Apr 2021 - First PulumiUP
Apr 2021 - Pulumi 3.0
Apr 2021 - Pulumi Packages to provide multi-language support for components and providers
Oct 2021 - Pulumi Kubernetes Operator
May 2022 - Java support
Nov 2022 - Pulumi Deployments to automate infrastructure deployments
Nov 2022 - YAML support
Dec 2022 - Hierarchical config
Apr 2023 - Pulumi Insights for intelligence, search, and analytics over any infrastructure
Apr 2023 - First Pulumi User Group (PUG)
Jul 2023 - Terraform conversion improvement as an easy way to migrate TF to Pulumi
Sep 2023 - Pulumi AI added to pulumi CLI
Sep 2023 - Go generics support added
Oct 2023 - Series C fundraise
Oct 2023 - Pulumi ESC to manage secrets and configuration complexity
Oct 2023 - Pulumi for Platform Teams through developer portals and more
Apr 2024 - Drift detection, TTL stacks, and scheduled deployments

We also shipped many other features that didn’t make this post, so please see our blog for all those details.

A Heartfelt Thank You

We are immensely grateful to our community for helping us reach this incredible milestone and making Pulumi a thriving ecosystem. Your contributions, feedback, and support have been invaluable in shaping Pulumi’s journey. We also want to thank the Puluminaries - our community leaders and advocates whose contributions have been pivotal to our success.

If you’re passionate about cloud infrastructure, consider joining the Puluminaries. As a Puluminary, you’ll gain direct access to our engineering team, preview roadmaps, and help contribute to code, content, and community support.

We look forward to continuing our innovations to democratize the cloud and empower developers worldwide. We encourage you to join our Slack community to engage with fellow developers and be part of the ongoing conversation about the future of how teams manage cloud infrastructure.

Thank y’all for being part of this journey. Here’s to the next 20,000 stars and beyond!

A recap of October 2023 - A big month at Pulumi!

Joe Duffy — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been hard at work and are having the biggest month ever at Pulumi. That includes two new products, Pulumi ESC and Pulumi for Platform Teams, and news of our Series C. That’s a boatload of fresh infrastructure as code innovation. And October isn’t even over yet!

Two New Products!

Here’s a recap of the news:

Pulumi ESC is a new approach to cloud environments, secrets, and configuration. It works for applications and infrastructure and cuts down on sprawl while making everything more secure. This tech spans developer desktop scenarios and scales up beyond 1,000s of environments. Read the overview, blog, or get started with the docs. Oh, and don’t forget to star the GitHub repo!

Pulumi for Platform Teams takes what we’ve learned working with over 2,000 customers and 150,000 end users, many building internal developer platforms, and provides common patterns and practices right out of the box. This includes a developer portal, a Backstage plugin, advanced deployment workflows, and the ability to report on and automatically remediate compliance policies. Read the overview, blog, or get started with the docs.

Can we help you build an internal cloud platform? Although the new capabilities are easy to use, we’re happy to give you a demo, discuss architecture, or even help you build out your internal platform. Get in touch.

These launches build on our “multi-product” momentum from our Pulumi Insights product launch earlier this year. Insights applies the power of generative AI to all things cloud giving you an intelligent interface to your infrastructure. We are taking infrastructure as code to many new places. We’ve processed over 130,000 prompts since launch — it’s free to use, so give it a try today!

Series C Fundraise

Last but not least, we announced our Series C. This fundraise will enable us to keep building an incredible team and reimagining how developers and infrastructure teams program the cloud. We’re hiring and have endless fun hard/problems ahead check out and apply to the open positions here.

Let Us Know What You Think

We can’t wait to hear what you think. Get Started with Pulumi, join our Community Slack, and let us know how you’re using these new capabilities and any feedback you have.

From the entire Pulumi team, thank you!

Building the Best Infrastructure as Code with $41M Series C Funding

Joe Duffy — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today we announced a $41M Series C fundraise from Madrona Ventures, NEA, Tola Capital, and Strike Capital. These new funds will help us accelerate momentum, keep innovating with the best infrastructure as code technology on the market, and expand into new product areas to solve even more of our customers’ most pressing cloud challenges. We’ve had a year of exciting milestones – surpassing 150,000 end users in our community, 2,000 customers, and 100 employees – and look forward to many more to come. The future is full of cloud, and yet incredibly bright!

Incredible momentum

Over 2,000 customers have chosen Pulumi Cloud for their infrastructure as code needs. Many more companies build on our open source, including over half of the Fortune 50. And we estimate that our community recently surpassed 150,000 happy and productive end users.

This year we made the top 5% of the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies in America and were listed in Redpoint’s InfraRed 100, to highlight transformative cloud infrastructure companies. This momentum will continue to propel us even further on our growth trajectory.

The best infrastructure as code

Why have we seen such incredible growth? It’s a combination of things: an amazing, multi-billion-dollar fast-growing market – infrastructure as code – plus a product that is widely recognized as the best product and clearly leading the innovation agenda in that market.

Pulumi’s unique approach to infrastructure as code is to stand on the shoulders of giants by letting you use any language. At the time we began, this was not a popular idea! In fact, a good friend of mine, who is a legend in the cloud native space, bluntly told me, “YAML is good enough – infrastructure as code doesn’t need that good of a developer experience.” We disagreed.

Our thesis was that we went through a one way door with cloud software. We have entered into the era of real distributed applications. And that is super exciting! It means all developers are building cloud software and that infrastructure is central to innovating in the modern cloud.

By applying the industry’s best languages to the infrastructure as code space, we gave the cloud a programmable surface area. We can now treat cloud building blocks as programmable objects and build bigger things out of smaller things. The cloud is the new operating system and this foundational technology lays the groundwork for us to realize our long-term vision.

Fast forward 7 years, and Pulumi is the fastest growing infrastructure as code product and has inspired others, fundamentally reshaping the landscape. Our end users and customers tell us all the time they feel not just 10% more productive, but 10x more productive, thanks to rich, expressive languages, great tools and editors, sharing and reuse, and because infrastructure as code in any language also means infrastructure as code for anybody in the whole team.

We also bet big on open source. Open source is in our entire team’s DNA. We honestly felt it was table stakes that something so fundamental to how we write code and build platforms be open source. This builds trust, helps to foster an ecosystem and community of openness, and enables new scenarios that we couldn’t have even imagined. We paired our open source technology with a great Pulumi Cloud SaaS that 2/3rds of our end users elect to use simply because it’s the easiest, most reliable, and most secure way to adopt Pulumi at scale. Because we were very thoughtful, intentional, and smart about the relationship between our open source and commercial products, we can stand confidently by our open source heritage forever.

Building a platform

Over time, we have expanded beyond infrastructure as code, by solving one problem after another that we see our customers facing. Let there be no question, we are still very much all about infrastructure as code! But as we have worked with our over 2,000 customers, we recognize they have other challenges in areas adjacent to infrastructure as code.

This began with Policy as Code. Policy as code allows you to verify that infrastructure state follows cost, compliance, security, reliability, or best practice guidelines. I ran static analysis efforts at Microsoft for many years during the Trustworthy Computing era and saw just how important and powerful enforcing policy as close to development time as possible is. We are still very early days here but we built Pulumi’s engine to support policy as code right from the outset.

Next came many obvious adjacencies to the infrastructure as code workflow, including Testing and CI/CD Automation. Thanks to our choice of general purpose languages, we decided to tap into software engineering practices too; we sometimes call this “infrastructure as software” because it goes well beyond “just code.” We then built the Automation API to answer the question of, what if infrastructure as code were a library you could link with, and not just a command line interface? The things our customers have built with these capabilities have been mind blowing: self-serve portals, custom CLIs and frameworks, and even entire SaaS products.

Last year, we then began branching out into entirely new product lines:

Pulumi Deployments delivers server-side orchestration of deployment workflows. We frequently heard from customers that no product on the market solved this for them. You can point Pulumi Cloud at a Git repo and get automatic Pull Request validations and deployments upon merges. Or do one-click deployments straight from the Pulumi Cloud console. Pulumi Deployments is highly extensible with a REST API unlocks a world of possibilities for platform teams, including but not limited to drift detection and remediation, blue/green and multi-region rollouts, dependent stack updates, ephemeral stacks, and automatic infrastructure cleanup.
Pulumi Insights provides search, analytics, and intelligence over your infrastructure, across any clouds. Our customers frequently told us they had trouble taming, or even getting visibility into, cloud chaos. The headline feature here is our Pulumi AI coding assistant: if you can dream up an infrastructure as code configuration, it can build it for you in any language. Pulumi AI quickly surpassed 100K prompts within its first couple of months. Insights also enables you to search over any infrastructure anywhere, helping you gain understanding over your team’s use of cloud infrastructure, analyze it further, or even just to find that needle in the haystack.

Pulumi is gradually shifting from a single infrastructure as code product to a complete enterprise platform. As we build out the platform, we do so in a highly integrated way. Pulumi Cloud pulls it all together with a unified data model, REST API, identity model, and AI model. These are not a loosely related assortment of technologies – they are deeply integrated, and can increasingly be adopted independently, but are better together even more than the sum of the parts.

What’s next for Pulumi

It is still day one for us and we’re only just getting started. Our ambitious mission is to democratize the cloud so that every builder, no matter their background, can make the most out of the cloud. And although infrastructure as code in any language makes a giant step in that direction, there is so much more to be done. If the cloud is the new operating system, there are entire application and security models still missing. For our customers, the cloud is a competitive advantage and they’re always wanting to do more, and to do it faster, with the cloud.

As we look to the future, there are several key themes we are excited to tackle:

The best infrastructure as code. We hear all the time from users and customers that they think Pulumi is the best infrastructure as code technology on the market. We want to keep it that way. Best means the most productive, the most fun, the most flexible, and the most enterprise grade. We will continue investing substantially into making this technology even better and more accessible while also growing our community.
Reimagined cloud developer experiences. The modern cloud’s capabilities are endless–and yet that can be daunting. For engineers simply wanting to build a modern cloud application or architecture, the concept count and level of abstraction demanded by the cloud are still often an order of magnitude more complex than they should be. We will continue leveraging our infrastructure as code foundations to deliver revolutionary new developer experiences that make us more productive and impactful in the cloud.
Security and best practices by-construction. Simply put, security should not be an afterthought. No best practice should be. Yet for most cloud platform teams, both still are. We have chipped away at this problem but there is more to be done. Pulumi’s approach enables us to apply tried and true techniques from the programming languages domain to ensure that applications and infrastructure are increasingly correct by-construction. We need to shift from finding things after-the-fact towards stopping security issues dead in their tracks before they ever make their way to production.
AI powers the next wave of cloud innovation. We are big believers in AI. We have already extended large models to deeply understand the cloud infrastructure domain and have realized immense benefits of doing so. We have begun to add AI to our product in areas that improve the user experience or deliver unique capabilities. As we go forward, just as we always relentlessly pursue the best developer experiences for our end users, we expect to ask ourselves, “How can this be better in an AI-first world?”

In short, the new Series C funds will allow us to double down on innovation that is already working, while breaking new ground in pursuit of our mission. Most importantly, we look forward to working with you, our end users and community, to build the best product experiences that solve your hardest and most pressing problems.

Thank you

It is a privilege to count over 2,000 customers, and 150,000 end users, as part of our community. I still remember coding furiously in my basement with Eric and Luke, and going live with our first customer, like it was yesterday. We are just as passionate about our original dream today as we were back then – perhaps even more so, since it is coming true!

We are also so lucky to have such incredible investors at Madrona, NEA, Tola, and Strike who believe in the Pulumi dream too, and are helping us to build an iconic company.

To our end users, we would not be here if it weren’t for you. Whether you are a community member, an enterprise customer, or anywhere in between, your continued feedback, success stories, and belief in the Pulumi vision keep us going and make it all worthwhile.

From the entire Pulumi team, thank you!

Five Years of Infrastructure as Code

Joe Duffy — Tue, 03 May 2022 10:16:25 -0700

Unbelievably, we just celebrated Pulumi’s 5th birthday. To commemorate, we are publishing multi-part series on all things infrastructure as code, starting with why we’re so excited about it:

All Roads Lead Back to Infrastructure as Code
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Infrastructure as Code Internals
Bringing Applications and Infrastructure Closer Together
Ringing in the Cloud Engineering Era
(Bonus) The Future of Infrastructure as Code

We published the first post today, and the others will soon follow in the weeks to come. The above hyperlinks will light up as they go live. We have had so much fun creating Pulumi and sharing it with you, and are just as excited about what’s in store during the next five years too!

AWS Enterprise Container Management with Pulumi

Isaac Harris — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Managing containers and Kubernetes clusters are consistently popular topic areas on the Pulumi blog and in our docs. Our customers regularly cite that Pulumi simplifies container management scenarios, making it the primary reason for choosing Pulumi to define, deploy and manage all of their cloud resources. This includes teams that are just starting their cloud journey and spinning up their first project, as well as teams that want to modernize their apps and services with cloud-native architectures or even scale from one to many clouds.

We’re excited to be launch partners for the new Enterprise Container Management category of the AWS Container Competency program because it perfectly encapsulates Pulumi’s capabilities across the entire lifecycle of container-based architectures and applications. These scenarios are critical to the success of every cloud engineering and DevOps team and include provisioning, governance, security, and observability across Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). Here is a handy guide to some of the features that make Pulumi a great Enterprise Container Management Solution and how Pulumi makes each container scenario easier for your team.

Provisioning Container Infrastructure

Pulumi manages multi-region, multi-account, multi-cluster Kubernetes deployments with ease on any cloud. With Pulumi Crosswalk for Kubernetes we’ve provided a set of Day 0 and Day 1 playbooks that take the guesswork out of the provisioning process from creating a control plane to deploying your apps and updating workers.

Managing AWS Container Services

Pulumi gives you the flexibility to pick the container services that meet the needs of your workloads and the requirements of your organization. Choosing the right services can be a challenge, so we’ve assembled a short overview to help you get started managing AWS containers. Once you’ve chosen your scheduler, Pulumi has a host of examples to guide you through deploying Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. There is also a Pulumi EKS component that provides multi-language convenience functions and boilerplate to simplify EKS deployments.

Support for the Entire Kubernetes API

Once you’ve provisioned a cluster, the Pulumi Kubernetes Provider enables you to provision any resource available in the Kubernetes API. This provides native support for features like Helm as well as the ability to configure Namespacing providing powerful multi-tenancy capabilities for your clusters.

Cluster Observability

Logging and monitoring are critical capabilities for keeping tabs on the health and security of your clusters. Fortunately, Pulumi has a host of integrations that simplify these scenarios including open-source tools like metrics-server and Prometheus as well as support for industry-leading platforms like Amazon CloudWatch and Datadog.

Authentication and Authorization

Adhering to the principle of least privilege for users and roles is an important step in securing your clusters and Pulumi has many capabilities to help you manage the complexities of authentication and authorization. For example, with Pulumi you can create and manage AWS IAM roles and you can integrate Pulumi Enterprise with your centralized identity and access management platform of choice via SAML 2.0 and OIDC.

Centralized Governance and Compliance Controls

Many customers are using Pulumi and Kubernetes to stand up shared services platforms (SSP) to empower their developers to self-service new infrastructure environments. To keep these environments compliant with internal policies, Pulumi Business Critical Edition includes CrossGuard policy-as-code capabilities built-in. This helps operators to ensure that configuration mistakes won’t reach production with policies that are enforced organization-wide.

Support for Hybrid Deployments

Many users need to manage container-based workloads on AWS as well as on-prem and on other clouds. Fortunately, Pulumi has built-in support for Amazon ECS Anywhere, so teams can use the familiar ECS control plane regardless of where their workloads need to run. Pulumi also supports the EKS Distro which brings the familiar managed Kubernetes capabilities of EKS to on-prem clusters.

Automated Deployment of Infrastructure and Applications

One of the benefits of Pulumi is that it enables infrastructure and application development to leverage the same tooling and processes familiar to software engineers. Adding infrastructure to your CI/CD workflow is easy with Pulumi because it supports a wide variety of test frameworks, simplifies the process of integration testing using ephemeral environments, and includes a CI/CD Integration Assistant to guide you through the process of connecting Pulumi to popular platforms such as GitHub Actions, AWS Code Services and many more.

Once you have your cluster provisioned, you can also deploy workloads into your cluster with GitOps style workflows using the Pulumi Kubernetes Operator.

Conclusion

This is just a sample of the many ways that Pulumi makes it easier than ever to manage containers and Kubernetes clusters in enterprise scenarios. Give it a try for yourself and let us know what you think in our Community Slack.

Get to Know Pulumi's UX Team

Anita Trimbur — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 12:06:33 -0400

What is user experience, or UX? There are plenty of answers depending on who you ask. At the core, UX is about asking questions and solving problems.

Who we are

Here at Pulumi, our UX team asks questions for and about developers. Our purpose is to understand the Pulumi user and do right by them. We come into conversations as user advocates on the lookout for stumbling blocks.

We are a cross-disciplinary UX team. Our designers define and imagine new experiences. Our dedicated UX engineer brings them to life. Collaboration affords us a dual-perspective on every problem. It also empowers us to make the changes we want to see. Together, our team adds value across Pulumi’s CLI, Service, marketing website, Docs, and Registry.

Some of the principles that matter most to us:

Community nurture
There are infinite ideas and not always a “right” answer
People are more important than tech

What we do

Sometimes our UX projects are as small as clarifying navigation options. Other times, they’re as large as exploring the future vision of the Pulumi Service Console. No matter what we’re working on, we’re always thinking about who we’re designing for. We optimize how users flow through our product. We reduce friction anywhere we can. In the end, our users can feel more confident using Pulumi.

Since the new year, our team has grown from one to four. Recently, we opened a new role for a second UX engineer! Our team expects to scale alongside Pulumi and continue to put people first.

Where you’ve seen us

You’ll find the UX team’s work everywhere. Maybe you noticed the revamped pricing page following our Business Critical launch.

Or maybe you clicked into our improved sign-in experience in Pulumi Service.

In truth, some of the best UX improvements are invisible. We aim to build experiences that feel so natural, they never break your stride. But should you have trouble, we’re here to help.

You can check out our public GitHub repo if you ever have a UX issue to report. There, you can also read more about our team members and our quarterly plans. If GitHub isn’t your style, we also frequent Pulumi’s community Slack channel.

Pulumi’s UX team is always ready to make an impact, and we hope you’ll stick around to, quite literally, experience it. Look out for more blog posts from our team moving forward!

2021 End of Year Review

Laura Santamaria — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 10:26:47 -0600

It’s the end of the 2021 calendar year here at Pulumi, and like everyone, we’re counting down until 2022 while looking back at our year. We’ve had a very exciting year! In case you missed anything from our past year, here’s a rundown of the top stories from Pulumi:

January

Pulumi became SOC2 certified in early January 2021.

February

We brought support for all four official Pulumi languages to EKS.

We released Python support for our powerful Automation API.

March

We immediately followed up with releasing C# support for the Automation API.

The Azure Native provider, which communicates directly with the Azure resource model, went GA (general availability) after a period of being in beta.

April

We had a bit of fun on April Fool’s Day with Pulumi Interstellar (if you don’t understand April Fool’s Day because it’s not something you have in your country, please know this is a joke for fun).

The biggest news for April, though, was our PulumiUP event, where we showcased new releases for the Pulumi platform. Here are the big announcements:

Pulumi 3.0: Automation API, native Providers, Packages and Components, improved SDKs for Python and Go, and new integrations and features.
Pulumi Packages and multi-language Components
The Google Cloud Native Provider

May

We took a bit of a break in May from the blog to be heads down working on the next features after the excitement of PulumiUP. We did talk a bit about integration with App Runner, though!

June

We started posting our release notes as regular updates to the blog.

We took some time to dive into testing infrastructure in one of our many educational articles.

We worked with the community for a hackathon on multi-language components.

We announced Pulumi Team Edition with usage-based pricing and a free tier to get you started and Pulumi Enterprise Edition with access control and more on the same usage-based pricing system.

July

July was a month of education, with articles on Cloud Engineering as a concept, more on testing, and a new series on Kubernetes:

August

We kicked off an entire series on Azure developers for this month. Start here.

September

September saw preparations for Cloud Engineering Summit, with blog posts talking about the upcoming event. Still, we had time for more features!

We announced a public preview of a Helm Release resource.

We launched a Provider for Snowflake.

We shipped the public release of the Pulumi REST API, which had been a behind-the-scenes powerhouse.

We started supporting AWS Lambdas on Gravitron2 processors.

We opened up our roadmap to the public to vote on and discuss upcoming projects.

And finally, just squeezing into the end of September, we launched the public preview of the AWS Native Provider, powered by AWS’s Cloud Control API, so you can use Pulumi to work directly with the AWS resource model.

October

Cloud Engineering Summit was our biggest event of the year, and you can enjoy all of the sessions over on PulumiTV. That being said, we still had a lot to share on the blog.

We introduced resource methods for Pulumi Packages.

We shipped the 1.0 release of the Kubernetes Operator.

We delivered the Pulumi Registry.

November

We started providing same-day support for Azure Container Apps.

We reworked functions to accept outputs.

December

We started some more educational series:

… and Beyond

As we look forward to 2022, we’re not done yet! We’ve done a lot of things in 2021, and we’re on course to do a lot more in the next year. I’m excited that we’re all along for the ride, and we can’t wait to share more features and launches with you. Thanks for being with us, and here’s to 2022.

By the way, did you know we’re hiring?

Pulumi is SOC 2 Certified

Eric Rudder — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pulumi’s Commitment

Pulumi is committed to operational excellence for our customers and one of the ways that we decided to demonstrate this was by completing our SOC 2 Type 2 Audit. After a lot of hard work these past few months, we are pleased to announce that Pulumi is now SOC 2 compliant!

The audit involved the entire Pulumi team. We needed to have proper controls in place across the organization and ensure that our key processes were documented and exercised. In addition, we reviewed our vendor selection process and made sure that all of our key partners were compliant with SOC as well. Our team used the overall process as an opportunity to review our overall governance and risk management procedures. Interestingly, the change in our work environment caused by Covid-19 actually helped us stress some of our process and policies, since we were forced to work remotely, much as if we had any type of interesting “event” at our headquarters.

Of course, we spent a large amount of time reviewing the security of our service. Security is already baked into our culture, with processes around training, code reviews, and the like, however, there’s no doubt this process helped us “up our game.” The policies that we already had in place (encryption of data at rest and in transit, auditing, logging, secure backup, etc.) gave us a strong foundation, however, as we reviewed key areas we found several areas for simplification and improvement.

The SOC 2 Journey

As an organization, SOC 2 requires us to promise that we abide by well-documented policies, procedures, and operational controls and to prove it to an accredited firm that reviews our operational discipline for several months. We were fortunate to find a great partner that was a superb resource as we initiated our first report. The auditors had to review a tremendous amount of data, much of it over shared screens in Zoom. Their experience also helped us think about how we can continuously improve in several key areas.

We decided to use a third party tool to help with the process. In retrospect, this was one of the best decisions we made, and picking a tool that fits with your organization is hugely important. Our engineering culture definitely believes in “get clean, stay clean” and a great tool that automates many of the routine checks is indispensable. In addition, having a central dashboard that lets you know “where you are” in your journey is incredibly valuable and can really help motivate the team. The tool also helped us find a number of enhancements that go above and beyond what SOC strictly requires. For example, we created a network diagram, which, while not strictly a SOC requirement, was a suggestion from the tool. Finally, all team members now have agent software on their laptops that helps maintain key standards that we’ve chosen for our security profile.

In addition, much of the operational excellence for SOC certification requires great DevOps discipline. Here, we had a huge insider’s advantage! We were able to use Pulumi itself to automate key procedures required by the process.

Going Forward

While we already had the key cultural attributes required for operational excellence, our SOC 2 journey was a great way to reinforce the importance of this to the entire team. Security, privacy, and resiliency are everyone’s job!

We’ve added additional training, and some templates and processes that will help us do an even better job in the future.

We have a leadership team that reviews key areas of the SOC profile quarterly, with each quarter having a special focus. For example, one quarter may focus on security, while the next may zero-in on disaster recovery. The meetings are documented and any work items identified go onto our team’s task list.

Most importantly, the journey isn’t over! Pulumi will continue to evolve. The SOC standards will continue to evolve. Industry tools and best practices will continue to evolve. We’ve come a long way since we started our SOC 2 journey and we’re committed to continuing to improve our operational excellence every day.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we approach security at Pulumi or have questions about our SOC 2 process, please reach out. We’re happy to share what we’ve learned along the way.

Pulumi raises Series B to build the future of Cloud Engineering

Joe Duffy — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $37.5 million in Series B funding led by NEA with participation from existing investors, Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital. We will use this funding to continue serving our fast-growing community of developers and infrastructure practitioners, making Cloud Engineering the new reality for organizations embracing the modern cloud in all aspects of how they ship software.

All software is cloud software,
All developers are cloud developers,
Infrastructure teams enable innovation.

Our vision for the modern cloud era

All software is cloud software, all developers are cloud developers, and infrastructure teams enable innovation. This is Cloud Engineering. The cloud has become a competitive advantage for many companies, enabling new disruptive business models and end user experiences. Pulumi aims to enable this new way of building.

We set out over three years ago to fundamentally rethink how teams create cloud software, with a belief that by standing on the shoulders of giants—leveraging our industry’s best languages, tools, and ecosystems for infrastructure—we could build a platform that uniquely enables developers and infrastructure experts alike to leverage the cloud in new ways. Despite having created languages like C# and TypeScript in our past lives, it struck our founding team that the world didn’t need another programming language, DSL, or YAML templating solution; instead, we could unleash creativity and collaboration by embracing the very languages our industry already knows and loves.

This led to Pulumi’s unique approach to infrastructure as code, something we often call “infrastructure as software.” Bring your own language, fire up your favorite editor, get full access to any or many clouds of your choice, and code away. Use standard libraries, package up and share and reuse your own best practices, or benefit from the community’s shared knowledge. Tap into all the goodness surrounding that language including familiar engineering superpowers like refactoring, interactive documentation and error checking in your IDE, debugging, test frameworks, and tools like code formatters and linters. All the while still getting the belts and suspenders of infrastructure as code: plan deployments by previewing them before they happen, get a full history of who deployed what and when, enforce security, compliance, and cost controls using policy as code, and more, all open source with an easy to use, but optional, SaaS backend.

In addition to turbocharging infrastructure as code, this new approach has enabled new ways to program the cloud. When we were starting, we often heard that infrastructure is “too boring” or that general purpose languages instead of YAML was “too powerful.” On the contrary, the day that AWS put a REST API in front of spinning up a new virtual machine, the world changed irreversibly forever. By having an entire programming and resource model for interacting with cloud infrastructure, we can layer rich abstractions on top, and build bigger things out of smaller things, as we’ve always done with operating systems and the hardware/software interface. As a recent example and preview of things to come, check out our new Automation API, something that simply isn’t possible with traditional YAML, JSON, or DSL-based infrastructure as code approaches.

We also took an approach of integrating with many incredible partners. Pulumi now supports over 50 infrastructure providers including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Alibaba, Auth0, Cloudflare, Datadog, Fastly, GitHub, GitLab, MongoDB, New Relic, and more; over a dozen CI/CD integrations including Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Octopus Deploy, and Spinnaker, for seamless and continuous delivery; and many identity providers, including Atlassian, Azure Active Directory, G Suite, GitHub, GitLab, and Okta. We embraced the Kubernetes ecosystem from day one, with great support for the entire Kubernetes API, managed clusters in all the major clouds (AWS EKS, AKS, GKE, etc.), Helm 2 and 3, Kustomize, Open Policy Agent (OPA)’s Rego language for policy as code, and a Kubernetes Operator, to name a few key features that are helping customers go to production with Pulumi and Kubernetes.

Three years after starting on this journey, hundreds of customers and tens of thousands of end users have used Pulumi to leverage the cloud in transformative new ways, and we regularly hear from developers and infrastructure practitioners about how Pulumi has enabled them to do things previously thought impossible.

Cloud Engineering is here — and growing fast

Cloud Engineering is bigger than just Pulumi. Last month, thousands of us tuned in to learn from industry leaders and expert practitioners at our first annual Cloud Engineering Summit. It is clear that Cloud Engineering is already here in a big way and becoming a standard for the most forward-thinking software teams.

A lot has changed in only three years. At the time we conceived of Pulumi, there was significant fragmentation, uncertainty, and difficulty in adopting Kubernetes, Serverless, Docker, and continuous delivery for production workloads. Developers seldom touched infrastructure. Fast forward to today, and we now have managed container orchestrators, including Kubernetes, across all the major cloud providers, most organizations are shipping daily, and it’s evident that mixed workloads of containers, serverless, VMs, and data services are here to stay. And 6.5 million developers have gone cloud native. Teams are now looking for solutions that help them go from idea to production faster than ever before, and Cloud Engineering is emerging as the best way to do just that.

Cloud Engineering teams are also standardizing on platforms and workflows that go beyond ad-hoc “walls of YAML and mountains of Bash” approaches, taming cloud software complexity while also improving reliability and security with technologies like policy as code. Teams are also increasingly looking for cloud-agnostic platforms due the reality of multi-cloud, whether that’s because they need to ship code to multiple cloud providers, manage Kubernetes resources in addition to cloud infrastructure, manage hosted SaaS infrastructure services by vendors like Cloudflare, Datadog, MailChimp, or MongoDB alongside their cloud infrastructure, or all of the above.

Because all software is cloud software, every software organization in the world needs a Cloud Engineering Platform. We are happy to be that very platform for many of the world’s most innovative companies, and look forward to helping many more customers disrupt their own industries as the cloud continues to transform modern businesses.

What’s next?

We remain focused on Pulumi’s mission to enable Cloud Engineers of all backgrounds, developers and infrastructure experts alike, to collaborate and do their best work together. We have made great progress in three years, laying a foundation that helps to democratize access to cloud infrastructure. But we’re only just getting started.

So, where do we go from here?

We will continue ensuring Pulumi is unquestionably the best infrastructure as code platform available. Features like the Automation API are enabling groundbreaking ways to use cloud infrastructure, powering entire platforms that themselves are powering entire organizations and new cloud products. We are also hard at work creating libraries with built-in best practices, new workshops and educational material, and simpler user experiences, all with the aim of making the cloud easier to use than ever before.

We aren’t going to stop there. This foundation also enables new and exciting product experiences. Although all software is becoming cloud software in a meaningful way, the cloud’s capabilities aren’t yet as easy to harness in our applications as a standard operating system’s are. The next phase of our journey will tackle this problem.

Pulumi is and will continue to be the Cloud Engineering Platform powering the world’s most innovative companies and teams. All software is cloud software, all developers are cloud developers, and infrastructure teams are central to enabling this innovation—and this Series B fundraise will help to ensure we realize the full potential of this vision!

I’d like to take a moment to thank our customers. Our community has grown into an inclusive and collaborative place, reflecting our own company values. One of those values says, “our own success is directly enabled by the success of our customers,” which we remember every day by helping you transform and innovate. We could not have done it without your support and you will continue to be our guiding light for the future.

To the clouds and beyond!

Joe

Pulumi Wins 2020 Gartner Cool Vendor Award

Sophia Parafina — Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Pulumi is honored to be named as one of only three vendors in the 2020 Gartner Cool Vendor for Agile and DevOps report, published on May 28th, 2020. Being recognized in this way is a strong validation of Pulumi’s impact thanks to our more modern approach to Infrastructure as Code and approaches to building cloud software. Vendors can only be selected once and in only one category making this an exclusive award.

What Makes a Cool Vendor

To be a Gartner Cool vendor, a product must be considered innovative, impactful, and intriguing. Vendors are scored on a scale of 1-10 across the following areas: technology, use of technology, business model, transformative nature, and newness. Vendor claims are rigorously verified by Gartner analysts who speak to customers to confirm that the technology works.

By using common programming languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, and Go to deploy infrastructure to any cloud, Pulumi has fundamentally changed the Infrastructure as Code landscape, enabling developers and operators to work better together. The impact on organizations is immediate. Instead of copying YAML or using a DSL, companies can write code to deploy infrastructure using industry best practices for development such as unit and integration testing, versioning, and error correction in IDEs. Moreover, infrastructure can be abstracted into reusable components to standardize on best practices while shipping faster with confidence.

Cool Features

Here is what we think makes Pulumi stand out from the rest.

Open-source meets SaaS. We do everything in the open, and the entire platform is available on GitHub. The Individual Edition includes the core provisioning engine, language and cloud providers, testing, Policy as Code, secrets management, and over a dozen CI/CD integrations. You can use Pulumi entirely offline or our SaaS for state management and team collaboration. We see strong community growth, and in fact, our community members are sharing and reusing best practices of their own!.
Any cloud, any language. Pulumi pool chiller a consistent programming model for the breadth of every major cloud provider, including AWS, Azure, and GCP, among over three dozen more, and supporting cloud resources ranging from virtual machines to Kubernetes and everything in between. You have the freedom to choose your language and deploy on one cloud provider or any combination of providers.
Testing. Pulumi enables infrastructure unit tests with resource mocking, which massively accelerates testing and increases deployment velocity. You can perform integration testing by quickly spinning up an ephemeral environment with only the resources you need to test or test long-lived environments in your CI/CD pipelines.
Policy as Code. Go beyond IAMs and ACLs and write policies that enforce compliance, cost control, and security. You can even secure your software supply chain by requiring the latest cloud resource versions to ensure vulnerabilities have been patched. Pulumi’s policy engine is open source, and the Enterprise Edition SaaS offers advanced features for organization-wide controls.

And we like to think that our mascot, Pulumipus, is also pretty cool.

Although Pulumi is cool, we have hundreds of organizations worldwide that have decided to run their production infrastructure using Pulumi. Check out some select stories here.

Be one of the cool kids today by giving Pulumi a try today – it’s not just cool, but the future of Infrastructure as Code and, we think, the way all developers and operations teams will collaborate in the future.

Pulumi’s Coronavirus Plan

Joe Duffy — Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Together, we’re facing an unprecedented situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this note, I’d like to tell you about the steps we’ve taken to ensure the health of our employees, community, and to ensure business continuity throughout.

To our customers

First and foremost, our thoughts are with anyone impacted by the virus either directly or indirectly. We are taking the utmost precautions necessary to ensure the health of our employees and the community.

At Pulumi, we are entirely customer and community-driven and have taken a number of steps to ensure business continuity. We know that stable infrastructure is critical to keeping your own business running smoothly and want you assure you that Pulumi is here for you as you focus on your own response to the situation.

Cloud infrastructure can be an essential component in the fight against this pandemic — something we are keenly aware of as we have government and healthcare customers that must scale up their response. If you or someone you know may be able to benefit from our technology, please contact us directly.

A cross-functional leadership team at Pulumi met early on and acted quickly, moving to remote work over 2 weeks ago. This same team regularly assesses recent developments and monitors local, state, federal, and international guidelines, to ensure that we react appropriately to the ever-changing situation.

Here are some of the concrete steps we have taken.

Remote work

The Pulumi team is fortunate enough to have been remote-friendly since our inception, with many employees already outside of our Seattle HQ, including international employees who are ready to help our customers. Over 2 weeks ago, we made the quick decision to move to 100% remote temporarily so that employees are safe and to support social distancing initiatives.

This shift ensures we are doing our utmost to support the containment of the disease spreading. Moving from remote-friendly to all-remote has required some changes, however, our own team has felt that it has overall pushed us to improve communication and knowledge sharing. GitLab’s all-remote guide has been very helpful in this transition.

Software as a service continuity

From day one, the Pulumi service was architected for continuous delivery without manual processes. We ship new features and improvements multiple times a week, every week, and this situation has not impacted that cadence. We have strong operations policies and procedures to respond to any situations that may arise.

Expect to see the same great dependable service you’ve come to know with a steady stream of new features and improvements in the weeks ahead as we get ready for our major product launch in early April.

Leveraging digital channels

The demand for Pulumi content and education continues to grow and, even in the face of restricted travel, we will ramp it up further. Although many events worldwide we’d planned to sponsor or otherwise participate in have been canceled, we have shifted to working with customers through digital channels wherever we can.

Our blog, Community Slack, and PulumiTV YouTube channel are already great online resources, but we have significant new efforts in the works. We’re starting a weekly live video stream called Modern Infrastructure as Code Wednesday featuring learnings from our deepest technical experts. We are having our first online Hackathon this Thursday. Our major upcoming launch on April 22nd has now turned into a day full of online infrastructure content from our team, customers, and partners. Learn more details about these digital events and more here.

Please drop us a note if you’d like us to participate in an online event, host a joint webinar, or want to see a specific topic covered.

In the weeks ahead

We will continue meeting regularly as a leadership team, and talking to our customers and partners, so that we can evolve our strategy and take new measures for health, safety, and continuity purposes as appropriate. We will keep you updated.

We are confident in what we are doing to keep our employees safe, continue delivering value and reliability in our products, and to keep Pulumi’s business functioning normally for our valued customers. Even as we deal with this pandemic, our entire team remains laser-focused on your success and, as always, if there is anything we can ever to do help with your own ever-changing needs, please get in touch with us.

2019 Year at a Glance

Joe Duffy — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As we celebrate another incredible year in the books here at Pulumi, I wanted to share some reflections about our most exciting milestones over the past twelve months. The best part has been connecting with more customers worldwide, as we saw more than a 15x growth in our customer base, surely a sign of big things to come in 2020. We couldn’t have done it without our amazing community; thank you deeply for your continued support and passion around Pulumi’s bold mission to empower every engineer to program the cloud — you make it all worthwhile.

It’s impossible to highlight everything, but here are some of our favorite milestones:

Pulumi 1.0. After working with several major organizations to go to production with Pulumi, including multiple Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers, we felt it was time to focus on a “1.0” release. To us, that meant significant improvements to quality, rounding out any open design issues, and sticking to compatibility. As such, we finished JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python support, made significant improvements to documentation and examples, and landed on a release we were proud to stand behind. Months later, we are up to version 1.8, and have stuck to our promise of “no breaking changes”: we understand how fundamental an infrastructure as code tool is to your organization, and how frustrating breaking changes would be. A solid 1.0 serves as a critical foundation for us going forward.

Global community. Our community of end users grew significantly during 2019, with thousands of end users sharing best practices on our Community Slack, and we expanded our physical presence globally. This included over two dozen events from big to small, including AWS re:Invent, Microsoft Build, Google Cloud Next, KubeCon EU and NA, and many Devopsdays, as well as several community workshops. We’ve also seen an uptick in community-led user groups and presentations, consulting and integration partnerships, and look forward to expanding our efforts here even more significantly next year. (If you ever need support/swag for your event, please contact us!)

Pulumi 2.0 roadmap. After 1.0, we published a roadmap to our next major release, Pulumi 2.0. The two themes for this release are to continue pushing the boundaries of productivity, while also giving you “belts and suspenders” for teams and enterprises. We feel this is the magic of Pulumi: the ability to simultaneously run fast and build out infrastructure productively and using the latest and greatest features in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes … while still ensuring that security, compliance, and cost-related requirements and best practices are adhered to.

Simpler, per-user pricing. When we launched, our pricing was based on the number of stacks you have. Although our hearts were in the right place with this approach, we realized after working with customers that this could force architectural choices based on price, not what was in the best interest of teams and their projects. This didn’t feel right — we don’t want to penalize teams for doing the right thing! We rolled out per-user pricing in response and have had success with teams of all sizes — from teams of less than 5 engineers all the way up to teams of hundreds.

Pulumi Crosswalk. We introduced the Pulumi Crosswalk brand for our collection of cloud-specific higher level frameworks that simplify many common infrastructure patterns, while also including built-in best practices. Throughout the year, we’ve rounded out that support, starting with AWS, then Kubernetes, as well as some initial steps towards frameworks for Azure and Google Cloud:

Pulumi Crosswalk for AWS simplifies common AWS patterns, including creating VPCs, ECS, EKS, and Fargate clusters, building and publishing Docker images to ECR registries, and more.
Pulumi Crosswalk for Kubernetes encapsulates battle-tested approaches to running Kubernetes clusters and related infrastructure in production. This includes playbooks for running Kubernetes in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, as well as kx, a highly productive library that eliminates the “walls of YAML” boilerplate from your Kubernetes applications configurations.
Although still works in progress, Pulumi Crosswalk for Azure will include simple Azure Functions callbacks and globally distributed applications that auto-scale alongside Cosmos DB, and Pulumi Crosswalk for Google Cloud will include simplified Google Functions.

Policy as Code (“CrossGuard”). We shipped a preview of our new policy as code support, code-named CrossGuard, which allows you to enforce policies at deployment time. CrossGuard brings the same “familiar language” approach we’ve used for infrastructure as code, and applies it to policy as code, enabling you to author your own rich rules to enforce security, compliance, cost, and team best practices. We open sourced previews of out-of-the-box rules by way of AWSGuard and OPA integration. CrossGuard is open source and Pulumi’s Team and Enterprise Editions support advanced organization-wide controls.

.NET. We have added initial preview support for writing your infrastructure as code in any .NET Core language, including C#, F#, and VB. This covers any existing Pulumi resource provider, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, as well as support for the entire Kubernetes object model. .NET, along with Go, will transition out of preview into being generally available as part of the 2.0 release.

More identity options. Out of the gate, we supported GitHub as an identity provider when authenticating with the Pulumi service. Since then, we added GitLab, Atlassian, Email, and SAML/SSO, with user guides for Azure ActiveDirectory, Google GSuite, and Okta. These all integrate with features like history/auditing, RBAC, and policy as code.

Enhanced, pluggable secrets. We heard that keeping secrets from leaking in plaintext to your start files is a challenge with current infrastructure as code tools. So, we deepend the way secrets integrate with Pulumi’s engine, including transitive encryption so that, no matter where your secret goes in your program, it won’t leak in plaintext. In addition, we added the ability to use your own secrets provider for encryption, including AWS KMS, Azure KeyVault, Google Cloud KMS, and HashiCorp Vault. This ensures you get great ease-of-use — falling into the “pit of success” with secrets — while still leveraging your existing organization’s approach.

More state storage options. Although the hosted Pulumi SaaS works great for most end users, offering the right mix of convenience and control, we understand it doesn’t work for everyone. It is now possible to store state locally using the pulumi login --local command, or to configure Pulumi to store state in AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage. Additionally, Pulumi Enterprise offers a self-hosted option, so that you can still benefit from the Pulumi SaaS’s features around identity, policies, and controls, while hosting it in your own cloud account or behind your firewall.

More CI/CD integrations. In partnership with customers, and in some cases the CI/CD vendors themselves, we have continued adding more CI/CD integrations, to enable automated delivery of your infrastructure. This includes Jenkins, Azure DevOps Pipelines, Octopus Deploy, Codefresh, and revised support for GitHub Actions.

Coexistence and conversion tools. We know that many teams have existing infrastructure in place. We want to make it a easy as possible to choose Pulumi and, as we’ve worked with major customers to transition away from existing infrastructure tools, we’ve built tools to help ease the adoption process. This includes the following approaches:

Coexist with existing infrastructure, including referencing existing Terraform remote state, deploying Kubernetes YAML as-is, deploying Kubernetes Helm charts, deploying AWS CloudFormation stacks, or deploying Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates — in each case, enabling you to consume output properties from infrastructure deployed via other tools, for either temporary or permanent coexistence of Pulumi with these other tools.
Convert your existing infrastructure so that it comes under the control of Pulumi. This includes adopting existing cloud resources, no matter how they were provisioned (even if done manually by pointing and clicking in your cloud’s UI), as well as the tf2pulumi tool, which converts existing HCL programs to Pulumi, preserving your existing Terraform project and code structure.

As of Pulumi CLI v3.71.0, tf2pulumi has been replaced with pulumi convert --from terraform. Converting Full Terraform Programs to Pulumi blog has more details.

Support for large-scale projects. As we’ve seen bigger and bigger Pulumi projects, we have put together guidance for multi-project approaches. This includes adding the ability for stacks to reference one another, an essential building block when, for instance, one project depends on a piece of infrastructure provisioned by another project.

Lots of providers! We’ve added more than 20 new providers for managing resources across many cloud and service providers. This includes the existing core cloud providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes, in addition to newly added providers DigitalOcean, Linode, OpenStack, Packet, and vSphere. Modern cloud infrastructures include components managed by SaaS or other service providers alongside and connected to your core cloud infrastructure, and for those, we have added support for Aiven, CloudAMQP, Cloudflare, Consul, Datadog, DNSimple, Docker, Fastly, F5 BigIP, GitLab, Kafka, MySQL, New Relic, Okta, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, SignalFX, Spotinst, and Vault.

It’s impossible to overstate how big an impact you, the community, have had on Pulumi. In fact, every feature on this list was delivered in response to a real community, customer, or partner need.

2019 has been a major year for the Pulumi community by any measure. As we look forward, we anticipate even more accelerated growth and capabilities. We wish you all a wonderful New Year, and want to again thank you for the love and support — here’s to an incredible 2020!

— Joe

2018 Year at a Glance

Joe Duffy — Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As we close out 2018, and enter into a New Year, I was reflecting on our progress here at Pulumi this past year and wanted to share some thoughts. It’s been an incredible year and we are hugely thankful to our passionate community, customers, and partners.

Here are some of the exciting things that happened:

Launching our open source community. After being hard at work for a little over a year, we launched our open source project, with the aim of making it considerably easier and more enjoyable to create and operate cloud software. This was a major moment for us. We had previously only shown Pulumi to a few select friends, family, and private beta users, and the reception was beyond our wildest expectations. We got passionate +1’s from cloud engineers of all roles and responsibilities – developers, infrastructure engineers, operators, and managers alike. The Pulumi community has since grown to thousands of users across hundreds of companies of all sizes spread across the globe. The community is now a warm, welcoming, and collaborative place with significant open source contributions and passionate community leaders emerging who are helping one another while also helping us to make Pulumi even better.

Support for major public, private, and hybrid clouds. We launched with support for the three major public clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and have since added capabilities across all of them, including adding serverless, containers, and infrastructure productivity libraries – it is here where we believe Pulumi’s unique approach of using general purpose languages truly shines. We immediately had a wave of inbound interest in applying the Pulumi approach to infrastructure as code in other areas, and quickly added other providers including OpenStack, VMWare vSphere, Alibaba Cloud, F5 BigIP, and more. In September, we unveiled a native Kubernetes provider with support for the entire API surface area across all versions, plus an operations tool, KubeSpy – both of which continue to lead to significant community growth. Many customers are loving that they can achieve a consistent engineering workflow across multi-cloud environments – often spanning public, private, and/or hybrid clouds.

Launching our commercial SaaS product. In October, we launched our commercial SaaS product, with reasonable pricing so that teams of all sizes are able to get their code to the cloud productively, securely, and collaboratively. If Pulumi is like Git – a local CLI and SDK – then the Pulumi SaaS is like GitHub – a hosted service to ensure you can use Pulumi in a team setting. In addition to the Team Edition, which is meant for the “Fortune 500,000,” we also launched the Enterprise Edition, for the Fortune 500. We already have multiple Fortune 500 customers moving into production with Pulumi, and expect this to be a significant area of future growth. Since launching, we’ve added support for more identity providers – including GitHub, GitLab, and SSO/SAML (for Okta, ADFs, and others) – as well as team management capabilities, such as RBAC, our GitHub App, GitHub Actions partnership, and more.

Closing our Series A funding. Also in October, we secured $15MM in additional funds, which will enable us to scale to meet the incredible opportunity in front of us. The funds will ensure that our open source projects are constantly improving and achieving production quality; that our commercial product can meet the most rigorous business requirements, small or large; and that we can grow our organization in areas necessary to meet our customers’ needs. When we set out to make it 10x easier for teams to do cloud engineering, we saw many facets in need of attention, and these funds will help us take concrete steps towards realizing the vision.

What an incredible year! It can still hardly believe it’s been just six months since launching.

As we look to 2019, we plan to continue engaging with and growing our open source community, built on the same tenets of openness and collaboration – the best part of my job. We have heard loud and clear that what customers need today are solutions, not just raw technologies, and we will continue to deliver commercial value in our Team and Enterprise Edition SaaS products that cloud engineering easier, more secure, and more collaborative.

We are just getting started and we can’t wait to continue on the journey of reimagining cloud engineering together. Thank you for your passionate support – and here’s to a wonderful 2019!

— Joe

Building a future of cloud engineering

Joe Duffy — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We founded Pulumi because of a deeply held belief that the cloud promises to change all aspects of software development and that there remains an incredible opportunity to reimagine the entire experience, from idea to creation to delivery to management, with one person in mind: you, the engineer.

Too often, we still think of the cloud as an afterthought, as though it were still 1998 with virtual machines and XML configuration. At Pulumi, we believe instead that the cloud is a first class application architecture concern. We still use thankless tools, markup languages, and brittle, homegrown delivery platforms. At Pulumi, we believe instead in a lovable and productive development experience, with excellent collaboration and reuse.

Since getting started just over a year and a half ago, we’ve stood on the shoulders of giants, tapping into decades of progress our industry has made in programming languages, runtimes, and frameworks, and marrying it with all the amazing innovation in cloud containers, orchestrators, managed data and AI services, and serverless capabilities.

The best part of this journey has been hearing from our passionate community. Thousands of engineers, and hundreds of companies, have created and deployed cloud applications and infrastructure using Pulumi. We are proud to be an open source company, and thrive on the daily collaboration and evolution of the platform.

And we’re just getting started! Today we are thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $15M in additional funding from our partners, Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital, both here in Seattle. We are honored by their shared belief in our vision and our team. Read more in our press release.

How We Got Here, a Tale of Cloud Evolution

We have seen stunning advancement in cloud platform capabilities. It’s hard to believe that Docker was launched just five years, and AWS Lambda only three, ago! And yet, these technologies change all aspects of how we create, deliver, and manage cloud software. Meanwhile, the cloud has become more programmable with APIs everywhere.

At the same time, “DevOps” as an approach to organizing teams and developing software has matured greatly, and is now the default for many organizations. New practices such as infrastructure-as-code, immutable infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering have modernized these roles, giving us approaches that can leverage a more rigorous software engineering practices to tasks that used to be more ad-hoc, manual, and error prone.

But despite these fundamental changes, the way we engineer the cloud hasn’t fundamentally changed. As cloud engineers, we still think of configuration as an afterthought and a task best suited for JSON, YAML, or DSLs. Each individual resource we provision – even fine-grained ones like serverless functions – requires often an equal amount of configuration as there is actual application code. The lack of expressiveness has led us to resort to bolting on templating systems, writing mountains of bash, and overall find ourselves swimming in a sea of complexity.

The problem is, these are crude approximations of familiar, general-purpose languages. They lack real abstraction, sharing, and reuse. You can’t fire up your editor and refactor, test, or analyze your code to find bugs ahead of time. Instead, you find simple syntax errors when it’s too late, after production is on the floor. Developers hate to touch those configuration languages, and yet simultaneously operators want to be more productive and empower their teams to collaborate.

It’s safe to conclude: we have hit the limits of the “afterthought” approach.

Towards Cloud Engineering

We believe in a future where developers and operators alike can meet on common ground to work together. We like to call this combined discipline cloud engineering. It’s not Dev, it’s not DevOps, and it’s not SRE; cloud engineering is the best of all of them. In this new future, our teams will experience more joy, collaboration, and productivity than ever before.

Enter Pulumi.

Using your favorite general purpose programming language – whether it is JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, or something else – you can express the entirety of your cloud software. As a cloud engineer, you can develop it in your favorite editor, with statement completion, built-in documentation, and interactive feedback when you’ve got something wrong. You can test things and benefit from static analysis and linters that enforce best practices. You can reuse packages, publish your own, and refactor your code just like with application code. In fact, after living in this world for long enough, the boundary between infrastructure and application code begins to blur.

This has led to a phrase we use a lot at Pulumi – program the cloud – our rally cry, if you will.

Just like code, we can collaborate with source control systems like Git – code reviewing changes, pushing and pulling code to perform deployments – using easy but robust continuous delivery workflows. Thanks to familiar languages, a cloud object model, and programmable cloud APIs, the system has true semantic understanding of your cloud software, its resources and their relationships, which can be used for rich deployment statuses and to organize and find information more easily. It’s never been such a breeze to go from idea to production.

We’ve become enamored by this new approach to creating software that is truly born in the cloud. But it’s not just our own belief – this new age of cloud engineering is working terrifically in practice. We have worked with organizations of all sizes – small ISVs to Fortune 500 Enterprises – to vastly improve their team efficiency and velocity. We almost always reduce configuration sprawl by an order of magnitude thanks to Pulumi, leading to a level of productivity that these teams previously hadn’t imagined was possible. Developers, operators, and managers alike are loving living in this future of cloud engineering.

Pulumi’s Next Chapter

We’ve only just begun. Pulumi supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Kubernetes in a big way, with early support for VMWare vSphere and OpenStack. Our delivery platform works great with your favorite CI systems. Expect to see continued growth in all of these areas, in addition to new clouds, languages, and integrations.

Today we launched the Team Edition for our SaaS delivery platform. This includes many features that you, the cloud engineering community, told us you need to better operationalize Pulumi within your teams. We already have many happy customers using these features successfully for organizations big and small. Expect to see a steady stream of improvements, in addition to Enterprise Edition capabilities for the largest of organizations needing on-premises, advanced security, and custom identity. Please always let us know how we can better meet your needs.

This new round of funding will allow us to strengthen our commitment to open source and community, increase our R&D velocity, and also scale our business to enable organizations of all sizes to successfully achieve cloud engineering within their teams. We are hiring in all areas of the company as we enter this next exciting chapter of the company.

Download Pulumi – we can’t wait to see all the great things you build next with Pulumi!

Joe & Eric