In this blog, we will work through an example that shows how to use Pulumi to enable GitLab-based continuous delivery with your Kubernetes workloads on Amazon EKS. This integration will work just as seamlessly for any Kubernetes cluster, including Azure AKS or Google GKE, using the relevant Pulumi libraries for Azure and Google Cloud.
Kubernetes is a powerful container orchestrator that is being adopted rapidly across the industry. At the same time, it is notoriously complex and presents a steep learning curve for newcomers. Nobody likes programming in YAML, and templates make it even harder. It’s difficult to understand the state of the cluster – Did my deployment succeed? Why isn’t my app working? And we often need to manage hosted cloud resources in addition to Kubernetes ones.
In this post, we will see how Pulumi can help you tame these issues and make Kubernetes more accessible, using familiar languages and your favorite tools. It’s simply Kubernetes made easy!
We’ve had a 1st class concept of encrypted secrets configuration ever since first releasing Pulumi. Customers have told us they love having such a simple and easy way to ensure safe management of tokens, database passwords, and more. Since launching, however, we’ve also heard that you’d like more control over encryption and to see this protection expanded to cover not just configuration, but all of the secret data within their Pulumi deployments.
To support this, we’ve added two new features to Pulumi in our latest 0.17.12 release:
Together, these features provide you with complete control over how secrets are managed within Pulumi deployments. We have worked with customers with advanced security and compliance needs while developing this feature, enabling them to use our online hosted SaaS with even greater confidence.
Here at Pulumi, we’re big fans of Docker: at this point there is little
doubt that Docker has completely revolutionized the way that we think
about deploying software. However, even in 2019, it’s quite difficult to
get Docker containers to production. docker run is great, and we all
love it, but unfortunately it’s quite a big leap from docker run to
running your container in a production-ready environment.
We recently wrote a blog post about using AWS Fargate to run your docker containers with our open source packages. In this blog post we’re going to focus on another interesting aspect of Pulumi: being able to re-use your infrastructure code for both development and production!
Pulumi-Azure open source package can be used to create Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters with AD service principals tied to the cluster. Monitoring and logging can also be enabled by default in simple steps with Pulumi for core AKS components. This article will show you how to write this as a simple example using Pulumi SDKs.
Today’s guest post is from Mikhail Shilkov, a Microsoft Azure MVP and early Pulumi user and contributor - enjoy!
Serverless compute services, like Azure Functions, offer an amazing power to application developers to leverage: highly available, automatically scaled, low-ceremony, pay-per-value functions created in several lines of code.
Azure DevOps is very popular among teams that want a single place to manage their development pipelines, Git repositories, builds, releases, and test plans. Pulumi’s open-source tools are a great choice for developers and operators deploying infrastructure as code on Azure. With these two tools at hand, adopting CI and CD for your Azure infrastructure is just a few steps away for you and your teams. To make it easy to use Pulumi with Azure, we are announcing an open-source task extension for Azure Pipelines!
Today’s guest post is from Mikhail Shilkov, a Microsoft Azure MVP and early Pulumi user and contributor - enjoy!
Today I want to guide you through the process of developing Pulumi programs to leverage Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services. My language of choice is TypeScript—a powerful and expressive typed language, which is very familiar to many Azure users.
Azure consists of dozens of cloud services, from VMs to Kubernetes to Serverless. In my experience, a lot of customers choose Azure for its strong portfolio of PaaS-level services.
Azure App Service is a well-established managed compute offering to run web applications, RESTful APIs, or background workers. Azure SQL Database is a fully managed service to run relational databases with features like high availability and backups available out-of-the-box. Enriched by services like Azure DevOps for CI/CD and Application Insights for APM, PaaS is a powerful way to get the benefits of the cloud without the need to fully re-architect software solutions.
The power of relying on PaaS is evidenced by significant customer adoption. App Service is among the most popular compute services in Azure:
If you use automation (ARM, scripts, TF, …) to define and deploy Azure infrastructure, which services are your primary target? Vote & RT!
– Mikhail Shilkov (@MikhailShilkov) April 23, 2019
Nonetheless, PaaS services pose different challenges to application developers. In particular, the usage of multiple cloud services demands an investment in infrastructure automation. That’s where Pulumi comes to the rescue.
Update: Check out the Learning Machine Case Study where provisioning went from 3 weeks to 1 hour with Pulumi and AWS.
“The impact of serverless capabilities was also transformative for the Learning Machine business. Pulumi enabled a rapid shift to Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda — the net effect of which was a 67% reduction in AWS charges. This enabled the team to spend less time focused on maintaining existing infrastructure and more time deploying new applications on AWS and adding new customers.
Pulumi is the foundational technology that allowed us to transform our organization,” said Hughes. The entire DevOps process was streamlined and in addition to realizing better productivity and higher quality, the team has new insight into their SaaS offering that they never thought possible.”
One of the most common areas Kubernetes operators struggle with in production involves creating and managing role-based access control (RBAC). This is so daunting that RBAC is often not implemented, or implemented halfway, or the configuration becomes impossible to maintain.
Fortunately, Pulumi makes RBAC on Kuberenetes so easy that you’ll never create an insecure cluster again. In this post, we will contrast the traditional way of working with RBAC on EKS with using Pulumi.
