![Deploy MERN Stack on DigitalOcean with Pulumi [Guide]](/blog/fullstack-pulumi-mern-stack-digitalocean/meta.png)
As a developer, I get lots of ideas for web apps—little things, mostly: nifty ways to keep track of my kids’ allowances, habit trackers, shopping lists. Most of them, however, never see the light of day, and not just because I’m lazy; I also tend to get hung up trying to decide what to use for the technology stack.
When you’re working with infrastructure, you’re inevitably going to need to upgrade or update that infrastructure. Whether it’s an operating system update or a desire to get CPU or memory upgrades, you will need the ability to pick resources and change them as necessary. In the past, this kind of upgrade would be done on the basis of individual resources, with each one being updated and checked either by hand or programmatically before moving onto the next resource. If you’ve ever done a database migration or if you ever did the recommended way of upgrading your computer’s operating system including all of the backup steps, you’re familiar with this process. Stand up the new resource. Check everything works. Move over the data. Check again. Tear down the old infrastructure. In a cloud computing environment, though, you’re often dealing with hundreds or thousands of resources, and doing one-by-one replacement is a nightmare that takes ages. However, there are other options, many borrowed from the application deployment world, that we have available to us because we write infrastructure as code.
In the last 12 months, we have experienced 350% year-over-year growth of our enterprise customers, including Mercedes-Benz, Snowflake, Atlassian and SANS Institute. Given the growth in our enterprise customer base, we are excited to launch today a new Business Critical Edition for the Pulumi Service, a 30 day Self-Hosted Pulumi Service trial, and the option to purchase Pulumi Enterprise and Business Critical through the AWS Marketplace!
The team has been busy releasing new features and improvements in the last 3 weeks. Read on to learn about what’s new in this release!
Pulumi is frequently used to manage the entire lifecycle of a resource, from creation, to updates, to replacement, to deletion. However, there are some cases where it is important to ensure that a resource’s life can extend beyond the lifetime of the Pulumi program that created it. To support these use cases, Pulumi now supports a new resource option RetainOnDelete which allows a resource to be retained in a cloud provider even after it is deleted from the Pulumi stack it is part of.
Pulumi community member Erik Näslund shares his thoughts on how to migrate from Terraform to Pulumi. Read on to learn all the details of his experience!
Update Plans now no longer require the PULUMI_EXPERIMENTAL environment variable. For the most up-to-date information about using Update Plans, please see the Update Plans documentation.
Pulumi’s previews are an important part of any workflow where you want to see the changes that will be made to your infrastructure before actually making the changes (with pulumi up). However, today there is no guarantee that the pulumi up operation will do only what was previewed; if the program, or your infrastructure, changes between the preview and the update, the update might make additional changes to bring your infrastructure back in line with what’s defined in your program. We’ve heard from many of you that you need a strong guarantee about exactly which changes an update will make to your infrastructure, especially in critical and production environments.
Back in September 2021 we announced public preview for the Helm Release resource in Pulumi’s Kubernetes provider. Over the last few months, we have had a very encouraging uptake in usage and several meaningful discussions with users in the community that have helped shape improvements to this resource. Thanks to this collaboration, we are now pleased to announce that the Helm Release resource is now GA (generally available) starting in v3.15.0 of the Pulumi Kubernetes Provider and SDK in all Pulumi supported languages. We are excited to offer yet another tool to Pulumi users to effectively manage their Kubernetes footprint.
We recently announced in our release blog (66) a new package: Command. In this article, I want to show you a practical application of this that will allow us to deploy k3s to a DigitalOcean Kubernetes droplet. We’ll then leverage the Command package to run a remote command to fetch the kubeconfig, generated on the VM, and pull it down to create a Kubernetes provider to deploy nginx.
So, let’s get started by deploying our DigitalOcean droplet.
Over the holidays we have been releasing new features and improvements. Read on to learn about what’s new in this release!
