Platform Engineering: Evolution or Rebranding?

Platform engineering has emerged as a hot area, but is it truly an evolutionary step toward a greater way of developing and operating software? Or is it merely a fad and a rebranding of existing ideas?
Platform engineering has emerged as a hot area, but is it truly an evolutionary step toward a greater way of developing and operating software? Or is it merely a fad and a rebranding of existing ideas?
Pulumi is excited to announce the release of Visual Import, a new feature that transforms the way platform teams onboard existing cloud infrastructure into Pulumi. With Visual Import, you can discover unmanaged cloud resources across your organization, organize them into logical units, and instantly generate high-quality Pulumi code—with AI enhancements built in.
Visual Import is now available for all Team, Enterprise and Business Critical customers with Pulumi Insights enabled.
One of the biggest challenges platform teams face when adopting infrastructure as code is migrating existing cloud deployments. Legacy scripts, manual configurations, and scattered resource ownership all slow down progress. Visual Import solves this by making the journey from cloud to code seamless and intuitive.
As part of the Pulumi IDP announcement at PulumiUP, we introduced the Pulumi Private Registry. For years, we’ve worked with organizations that have built their own internal developer platforms on top of Pulumi. During that time, we identified what we believe is the best method for creating flexible golden paths – a bottom-up approach that utilizes a central source of truth to drive golden paths. Thanks to Pulumi Private Registry, this approach has never been simpler.
Today, we’re excited to introduce Pulumi IDP (Internal Developer Platform), the latest evolution of the Pulumi Cloud Platform, designed to help organizations automate, secure, and manage everything they run in the cloud.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Pulumi can provide enormous amounts of leverage, but they must be used correctly to also provide safety. One of our main jobs as infrastructure engineers is to not break things, so leverage without safety is useless. If something is safe, we can change things easily without even thinking about it. If it isn’t, we’ll be up until 2 a.m. fixing what we broke.
Snowflake is the data cloud powerhouse for countless businesses, critical for everything from customer dashboards to billing pipelines. The stakes are immense: this data must be strictly secured and always available. But managing this with static credentials or manual key rotation creates persistent security vulnerabilities and introduces operational instability, risking disruptions during clumsy updates. Pulumi ESC eliminates this dilemma with two purpose-built Snowflake integrations:
snowflake-login
: Provides dynamic, short-lived OIDC tokens for temporary authentication to Snowflake.snowflake-user
: Automates the rotation of RSA keypair secrets for Snowflake users, essential for secure key-pair authentication.Securing access to critical data stores is paramount in today’s cloud-native world. Yet, managing database credentials often involves static, long-lived passwords – a significant security blind spot. These static secrets, frequently embedded in application configurations or accessible to multiple team members, represent a prime target for attackers. Manually rotating these credentials is a cumbersome, error-prone task that’s often neglected, leaving databases vulnerable for extended periods. Building on our commitment to robust secrets management, we are excited to launch Automated Database Credential Rotation for PostgreSQL and MySQL in Pulumi ESC!
We are thrilled to announce enhanced integration support for Infisical within Pulumi ESC! Pulumi ESC centralizes secrets and configuration management, providing a unified source of truth across your environments. With the addition of Infisical, a popular open-source secrets management platform, ESC further extends its ecosystem, enabling seamless and secure access to secrets stored across diverse systems.
We’ve been busy over the past two months, shipping significant enhancements across the Pulumi ecosystem. From major improvements to our core IaC platform with Azure Native V3 and cross-language Components to powerful new capabilities in Pulumi ESC and Insights, these updates deliver on our commitment to making cloud management more powerful, accessible, and secure. We’re particularly excited about our AI integration through the MCP Server, enabling developers to work with infrastructure in a more intuitive, contextual way. Let’s dive into the details of what’s new.
In previous articles, we looked at how platform engineering fixes infrastructure chaos, enables self-service, and improves developer workflows. These pillars work together to boost both developer productivity and organizational speed.
But there’s still one critical element that can make or break all this progress: security.
Traditional security efforts — even “shift-left” initiatives — often create friction instead of clearing the way for innovation. Embedding security directly into your platform changes that. By weaving in policy-as-code, centralized secrets management, and identity-based authentication, you turn security from a blocker into an enabler. And with the right metrics, you can measure how well your platform balances protection and speed.