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 Platform as a Service

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.

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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.”

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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.

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Creating serverless applications just got even easier! You can now protect your application APIs in just three easy steps. We’ve already posted about how easy it is to create serverless apps in Pulumi. Now, we’re helping you simplify protecting those apps with API Gateway and Lambda authorizers.

With Pulumi’s new AWSX package, you can quickly define a Lambda and an AWS Lambda authorizer to protect it. We’re once again harnessing the power of Lambdas as Lambdas to allow developers to focus on writing code.

Today, we will walkthrough creating a simple serverless app using AWS and Pulumi. We will simplify implementing the OAuth protocol by using Auth0 and AWS Lambda authorizers to authorize users. Auth0 provides a universal authentication and authorization platform for applications. It has become an extremely popular platform for user management because Auth0 makes OAuth easy.

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Since launching last year, thousands of users and hundreds of companies, from startups to Fortune 500 Enterprises, have chosen Pulumi for cloud applications and infrastructure delivery across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. Today we are announcing important changes to better align our product and pricing with how we’ve heard you want to use Pulumi in production. We’re optimistic that these changes will help companies of all sizes choose Pulumi, enabling their teams to deliver cloud applications and infrastructure faster and more reliably.

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Using Pulumi and general purpose languages for infrastructure as code comes with many benefits: leveraging existing skills and knowledge, eliminating boilerplate through abstraction, and using the same ecosystem of tools like IDEs and linters that your team already knows and loves. In general, these are all attributes of software engineering, which not only make us more productive, but also improve the quality of our code. It’s only natural, therefore, that using general purpose languages unlocks another important software engineering practice: testing.

In this article, we will see the many ways in which Pulumi lets us test our infrastructure as code.

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Pulumi lets you create, deploy, and manage Google Cloud applications and infrastructure in familiar languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python, and without needing to learn new DSLs or YAML templating solutions. This means great productivity and getting to use tools you already know and love. Since serverless is all about focusing more on your application code, and less on infrastructure and configuration toil, we absolutely love Google Functions.

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Google Cloud is one of the most exciting cloud platforms available today, with a breadth of powerful infrastructure services from Google Container Engine (GKE) and Google Cloud Functions to Cloud Firestore and Cloud Spanner.

Pulumi is the most productive tooling available today for teams building cloud applications and infrastructure, in your favorite languages. Add them together, and teams can easily take maximum advantage of Google Cloud Platform’s rich features, productively, with a combined platform that makes it easy to collaborate, share, and reuse.

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Across the industry, the popularity of Python is exploding. Amongst our own customers at Pulumi, who automate their infrastructure using Python, we’ve seen the same. Stack Overflow wrote about the astounding growth of Python: The term “fastest-growing” can be hard to define precisely, but we make the case that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language. – David Robinson, Stack Overflow Since Python is not a new language, what could be driving this incredible adoption curve?

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Pulumi makes developing and deploying rich serverless and container-based applications a breeze. But how do you monitor and observe those applications while they are being developed and once they are deployed? There are many great answers: from the built-in capabilities of the underlying cloud services (Lambda, ECS, Kubernetes, and more), to great 3rd party solutions like IOpipe and Epsagon which we highlighted recently on this blog.

The Pulumi CLI provides another way to do logging, without requiring the additional setup of these existing solutions and seamlessly integrated into your Pulumi development workflow. The pulumi logs command provides a great first place to start for understanding your Pulumi application’s behavior. Especially during development, this command provides direct insight into the behavior of your application, bringing together logs across all of the different forms of compute you are using - from code running in serverless functions to containers to VMs.

Let’s take a quick look at pulumi logs and some of the ways it can be used as part of the inner loop of your Pulumi development.

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