Cloud Native Infrastructure with Kubernetes and Pulumi
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Kubernetes has quickly become the “gold standard” for running containers in production, spanning public, private, and hybrid cloud scenarios. It’s been remarkable to watch its explosive growth just this past year alone. Every cloud vendor now supports an easy-to-use managed Kubernetes solution — Google GKE, Azure AKS, and AWS AKS — making it easier than ever to start writing and deploying Kubernetes applications.
Pulumi for Kubernetes is a way to create, deploy, and manage Kubernetes applications using your favorite programming languages. that works across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, and other clouds, now to Kubernetes and cloud native architectures. You can dive right in here and look at some powerful things Pulumi enables here.
Why Pulumi?
Kubernetes is essentially the “POSIX” for the cloud and unlocks the potential for a true cloud native development platform to be built on top. We at Pulumi are tremendously excited by this opportunity – it aligns perfectly with our vision for the future, and our language-driven and true platform approach.
Despite these advances, Kubernetes can still be intimidating to use. This is true for newcomers and experts alike. The use of YAML for configuration has led to the “Wall of YAML” problem, giving way to many quasi-languages, often rudimentary templating systems bolted on top of YAML. The lack of true end-to-end deployment support – including orchestrated rollouts, knowing when a deployment has completed successfully, or even managing resources outside of Kubernetes itself like databases, container registries, and other hosted services – has led to the “Mountains of Bash” problem. All aspects, from creation to deployment to management, can be difficult, particularly at scale.
We envision a future where all developers and DevOps engineers seamlessly leverage Kubernetes to program the cloud. To get there, we need to bring joy, ease of use, and simplicity to the entire Kubernetes software development lifecycle. We must eliminate toil and maximize productivity. This is precisely what Pulumi for Kubernetes aims to do.
Familiar Languages
Our favorite way to program Kubernetes is using TypeScript, as it delivers strong typing where possible and dynamic typing where needed. This delivers great IDE support out of the box, no matter your IDE of choice, complete with auto-completion, interactive documentation and error reporting, refactoring support, and more. The result is a radically improved inner development loop. In addition to TypeScript, JavaScript works too, and Python and Go are on the way.
Perhaps the best part of using a familiar language is instance access to an ecosystem of libraries. Any NPM module is an npm install away. And you can create your own libraries – classes to encapsulate full components, and functions to capture repeated patterns of code – helping to reduce boilerplate, maximize reuse and sharing, and make you more productive. The standard Kubernetes guestbook shrinks to a mere 20 lines of code thanks to abstraction!
Many of our customers have already used this capability to capture best practices within their own team, shrinking 1,000s of lines of copy-and-pasted YAML to just a handful of lines of real code.
We are just getting started with our own Kubernetes abstractions, but we’re most excited to see where you, the community, take things.
End-to-End Deployment Orchestration
Pulumi programs are deployed using a single CLI command
$ pulumi up
This command works the first time – when all resources will be created – in addition to all subsequent updates. Each update will show a full diff of what has changed before you deploy anything:
Because Pulumi also supports resources for all clouds – including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack, and VMWare vSphere – you can mix and match all of your infrastructure needs using one consistent programming language, model, tool, and workflow. This means, for example, that a single program can provision your Kubernetes resources alongside Azure CosmosDB, a Google Container Registry to publish your Docker builds to before pulling them in your cluster, an AWS S3 Bucket for your application, or even CDN and DNS entries for your cluster. Pulumi’s notion of stacks makes it easy to multi-instantiate your application for different environments.
Programs are just code, unlocking sophisticated cloud native scenarios; e.g.
- Deploy a canary, wait for Prometheus health checks to pass, and then promote
- Create a base class that injects Envoy sidecars automatically for any pod in your org
- Manage your Envoy config as code, and version it alongside your Kubernetes config
The Pulumi Delivery Platform works in tandem with the CLI to ensure continuous delivery of your infrastructure. This supports robust deployments in a team environment with state checkpointing and concurrency control. It integrates with any CI system and supports a GitHub App that you can install to get previews of changes inside your Pull Requests. This enables a true GitOps workflow – for both Kubernetes config updates, and your cloud infrastructure.
What’s Next
With Pulumi’s support for Kubernetes and cloud native architectures, we hope that familiar languages will bring you more joy, reduce toil, and ultimately lower the barriers to entry for using Kubernetes with real components and reuse.
We can’t wait to hear what you think. To learn more or give it a try, please check out these resources:
These two tutorials will walk you through your first Pulumi for Kubernetes project:
- Tutorial: Deploy a Stateless Nginx Application
- Tutorial: Deploy a Load-Balanced Guestbook App with Redis and Nginx
Program Kubernetes with 11 Pearls: a companion blog post with 11 exciting examples.
Pulumi: A Better Way to Kubernetes: A walkthrough on how Pulumi can make Kubernetes more accessible, using your favorite languages and tools.
If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you in our Community Slack or over on GitHub.
Happy cloud native hacking!
