One of the most exciting aspects of using Pulumi can also present some interesting engineering challenges. Pulumi supports three operating systems, multiple programming languages, and almost 40 different providers. This means creating tooling that works effortlessly across all possible user scenarios can often throw unexpected challenges our way.

Nowhere are these challenges more prevalent than in the Pulumi Docker containers.

The pulumi/pulumi Docker container is almost 3Gb uncompressed, which is generally considered large for a Docker image. In this post, I’ll examine why this container has grown to the size that it is, and talk about how we hope to solve it.

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Containers solved the problem of moving software from one environment to another because they encapsulate all the software dependencies. However, an orchestration platform is needed to manage containers at scale. Kubernetes is a popular open-source solution that uses declarative configuration to specify the desired state of the application. Configuring and deploying an application on Kubernetes is often accomplished with YAML files to define the state and command line tools to manage and control the Kubernetes API. This article demonstrates how to use infrastructure as code to create basic Kubernetes objects and higher-level abstractions that build upon the basic objects.

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Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. This makes it a perfect fit for Pulumi to unleash the power of Spinnaker and its continuous delivery capabilities to all of the providers that Pulumi supports today and in the future.

We have written a developer guide showing you how to install the plugin in your Spinnaker instance and start using it right away.

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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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Policy as Code for Python is now GA in Pulumi 2.0. Policies written in code let you test, automate deployment, and enable version control. Python is a popular scripting language used for machine learning and artificial intelligence, data science, web development, and devops. It’s an ideal language for developers and operators to use in common.

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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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