Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is almost here! We’ve got a great line up this year.

Our tracks are built around the three pillars of cloud engineering: Build, Deploy, and Manage. I’m your track chair for the Deploy track, the track focused on automating and managing infrastructure. Deploy is all about unifying systems so everything in a cloud-based system is shipped together from the same automated, auditable process, reducing human error and improving quality across the board. That could mean focusing on automated testing and linting of infrastructure as code, providing shared services platforms for others to use in their pipelines, or exploring how unified and automated infrastructure changes engineering culture in an organization.

In no particular order, let’s go explore the Deploy track lineup.

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Kubernetes has been a significant focus of Pulumi since its very beginnings. Pulumi added support for installing Helm charts way back in 2018 and it has seen significant adoption by users since. However, Pulumi’s current Chart integration lacks support for some increasingly common advanced features in Helm charts, e.g.:

1. Support for Helm lifecycle hooks
2. Handling sub-charts and dependencies

As Helm and its usage evolved over the years, Pulumi users using the Chart resource have often had to get very creative in order to get the desired functionality in their deployments.

Today we are excited to announce the public preview of a new Helm Release resource starting with v3.7.0 of the Pulumi Kubernetes Provider and SDK in all Pulumi supported languages. This new resource provides Pulumi users more options to choose the right tool for their use-case. The rest of this blog post will highlight how this resource differs from the existing Helm Chart component resource and describe how and when to use the new resource.

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The Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is coming up fast, and the speakers are out! To get you ready to attend, let’s take a look at the sessions for the Manage track.

The Cloud Engineering Summit’s three tracks are built around three concepts: Build, Manage, and Deploy. I’m Matt Stratton, and I’m your charismatic track chair for Manage. For us, that means managing cloud applications and infrastructure with Policy as Code, visibility, and access controls. For example, managing infrastructure with policies that detect configuration drift, enforce best practices, and even prevent compliance violations before deployment. It means building visibility across your cloud infrastructure so that you always understand its current and past states, including detailed audit history. Finally, you ensure the right guardrails and controls are set in place so that distributed teams can securely develop.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at each of the talks I’ve selected for you!

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Kubernetes is everywhere now, but it’s primarily been the domain of people working on the ops side of infrastructure. What about devs, though? You benefit from knowing what Kubernetes is and how to use it, too—otherwise, we’re still putting teams in silos. In this blog, we’re going to build off part one by learning about managed Kubernetes services: what they are, when they’re useful, and how you can try deploying to one yourself, starting with Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

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What comes to mind when you hear DevOps? Frequently, DevOps is described as a cultural practice that enables an organization to deliver high-quality applications quickly. The DevOps model emphasizes the “breaking down of silos” and combining development and operations into a single team. Developing, deploying, and maintaining an application is the responsibility of both developers and operators across the application lifecycle.

DevOps processes rely on tooling to automate delivering and maintaining applications. This article demonstrates how to implement Azure Pipelines to build and deploy applications.

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Summer is quickly flying by, and we’ve been hard at work with more new features and updates across the Pulumi ecosystem!

• New and updated cloud providers
  • EKS Pulumi Package supports more options for managed node groups
  • New resources in the Azure Native provider
• Pulumi CLI and core technologies
  • Methods for Pulumi Component Packages
  • dependsOn now works for Pulumi Component Packages, and more
  • Aliases can now be used with providers
• Pulumi Service and Pulumi.com
  • Azure Native resources now link to the Azure Portal

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All modern software is cloud software, and it’s more than likely that it runs on Kubernetes. Developers are faced with the challenge of deploy applications composed of many microservices. And each microservice adds to the complexity of the deployment.

This article reviews the different methods for deploying applications on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

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History lesson time! In 2011, microservices debuted as an architectural style suited for the cloud. In 2013, Docker simplified building containers. Combining containers and microservices sparked a change in how applications were built and distributed in the cloud. As performance, scaling, and reliability became an increasing concern, container orchestration platforms became widely available. Kubernetes became the dominant container orchestration through community and corporate support, and some have suggested it was inevitable. Every major cloud service provider, including Azure, offers a version of Kubernetes.

Kubernetes streamlines container deployment and management, making applications scale and accessible. This article demonstrates configuring and deploying Kubernetes with Azure.

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Static web applications are a popular way to publish websites. There are many reasons for adopting static web applications, including speed, security, version control, scalability, and reduced cost.

This article goes into depth about the two types of static web applications that Azure offers. The first uses Azure Blob Storage to serve static data. The second method is Azure Static Web Apps which follows the pattern of Jamstack applications that use a static website generator integrated with source control that publishes to a Content Delivery Network. We’ll take an in-depth look at both methods and consider the pros and cons of each.

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The previous article was a deep dive into virtual machines. First, we used the Azure Portal to create and deploy a virtual machine; then, we repeated the process using infrastructure as code. We further demonstrated how to automate provisioning as part of cloud engineering’s build and deploy processes.

This article will explore the other end of the cloud infrastructure with serverless, which is an on-demand, fully-managed cloud architecture.

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