Ever since AWS Lambda was released in 2015, users have wanted persistent file storage beyond the small 512MB /tmp disk allocated to each Lambda function. The following year, Amazon launched EFS, offering a simple managed file system service for AWS, but initially only available to mount onto Amazon EC2 instances. Over the last few months, AWS has been extending access to EFS to all of the modern compute offerings. First EKS for Kubernetes, then ECS and Fargate for containers. Today, AWS announced that EFS is now also supported in Lambda, providing easy access to network file systems from your serverless functions.

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When deploying infrastructure, we want to ensure that what we’re deploying matches our expectations. One way to do so is via unit testing. We’ve talked about this concept in previous posts, such as in this overview and this post on deployments with .NET.

Often, when we’re creating cloud resources, we want to ensure that a resource’s underlying assets match certain properties. For example, the entrypoint or handler for a cloud function should be an executable function. Similarly, objects we’ll serve as static assets on a website should not exceed a certain size. We can use Pulumi’s unit testing framework along with language-specific constructs such as introspection or filesystem calls to ensure this type of correctness. We’ll walk through some examples to show just how easy it is to do so.

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A Jamstack is a modern architecture for building websites; JAM stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. Jamstacks are deployed on a CDN, and content is stored on a cloud services provider. In addition to the speed and simplicity of deploying static content served from a CDN, there are other advantages such as maintaining content with git, modern build tools to generate the static content, automated builds, atomic deploys, and instant cache validation.

While build tools have simplified the process of creating content ready for deployment on a CDN, creating the infrastructure to serve the content remains complicated. You can use a cloud provider’s web interface or script the build using a CLI tool if you want to manage your infrastructure instead of using a hosted solution. The alternative is to use infrastructure as code tool to automate building and deploying cloud resources. This article demonstrates how to create a jamstack website and deploy it on AWS using Pulumi.

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We recently announced the 2.0 release of Pulumi which includes parity for Node.js (JavaScript, TypeScript), Python, .NET (C#, F#, etc) and Go, and improvements to Kubernetes and dozens of other supported cloud resource providers.

Kubernetes support in Pulumi spans orchestration of clusters and application workloads. Clusters can be managed by cloud providers or self-managed. Workloads use the same Kubernetes API to create and manage API resources in the supported Pulumi languages through packages directly generated from the OpenAPI specification.

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You’ve containerized your application, and it’s running great on your desktop using Docker Compose or Swarm. But now it’s time to test it locally with minikube and then put it into production with Kubernetes. Manifests are a bit like Compose files - it’s just YAML, right?

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Amazon EKS clusters can use IAM roles and policies for Pods to assign fine-grained access control of AWS services. The AWS IAM entities map into Kubernetes RBAC to configure the permissions of Pods that work with AWS services.

Together, AWS IAM and Kubernetes RBAC enable least-privileged access for your apps, scoped to the appropriate policies and user requirements.

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Guest Article: Dustin Farris is an experienced cloud engineering consultant. He’s currently building a new data lake for a large public university using Pulumi. The project handles sensitive student and research data and as a result, his team must meet stringent QA and security requirements. Dustin shows how resource mocking in Pulumi makes testing and verification faster than ever before.

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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.

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Writing infrastructure policy in a high-level programming language helps automate and enforce best practices. When policies are written with code, you can apply software development practices such as testing, automated deployment, and version control. Cloud providers typically offer a GUI to create policies, but creating policies is not easily repeatable, nor can you version policies. Moreover, policies must be tested against a live system, which means using an existing system or configuring and deploying an ephemeral version.

While the benefits of writing policies as code are evident for developers and operators, the organizational benefits are even more significant. Organizations can realize cost savings, improved compliance, efficient deployments, fine-grained control over infrastructure, and better use of cloud provider native resources. Let’s take a look at these benefits in-depth.

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Because Pulumi uses general-purpose programming languages to provision cloud resources, you can take advantage of native tools and perform automated tests of your infrastructure. The full power of each language is available, including access to libraries and frameworks for testing.

This blog post takes a deeper dive into mock-based unit testing of Pulumi programs written in C# and F#.

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