Kubernetes is a powerful container orchestrator for cloud native applications that can run on any cloud – AWS, Azure, GCP – in addition to hybrid and on-premises environments. Its CLI, kubectl, offers basic built-in support for performing deployments, but intentionally stops short here. In particular, it doesn’t offer diffs and previews, the ability to know when a deployment has succeeded or failed, and why, and/or sophisticated deployment orchestration.

In this post, we’ll see how Pulumi, an open source cloud native development platform, can not only let you express Kubernetes programs in familiar programming languages, like TypeScript, instead of endless YAML templates, but also how Pulumi delivers simple and reproducible, yet powerful, Kubernetes deployment workflows.

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Just over a month ago we publicly launched Pulumi, a new cloud native development platform.  The response has been overwhelming and we’ve been hard at work responding to your feedback ever since.

Today, we are excited to release Pulumi 0.15 and make it available to download.  This release includes improvements across the entire Pulumi development experience. Pulumi supports more platforms (Kubernetes and OpenStack, is faster (Parallelism, simpler (native TypeScript support), richer (serverless frameworks for Azure and Google Cloud),  and is more deeply integrated into the application lifecycle (GitHub App for CI/CD integration).

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Hello! A few weeks back I wrote a post on serving static websites on AWS with Pulumi detailing how to host a static website on AWS. Pulumi allowed me to wire four different AWS products together in only 200 lines of code. It would be a shame, however if I needed to copy and paste that code every time I wanted to to stand up a new website. Instead, we can package up, share, and reuse our code just like any other Node.js library. It just so happens that this one can be used to create cloud infrastructure.

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In this post, we’ll look at 12 “pearls” – bite-sized code snippets – that demonstrate some fun ways you can program the cloud using Pulumi. In my introductory post, I mentioned a few of my “favorite things”. Now let’s dive into a few specifics, from multi-cloud to cloud-specific, spanning containers, serverless, and infrastructure, and generally highlighting why using familiar languages is so empowering for cloud scenarios. Since Pulumi lets you do infrastructure-as-code from the lowest-level to the highest, we will cover a lot of interesting ground in short order.

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If you’ve been following the blog, you know that Pulumi is great for building serverless applications, container-based applications, and a combination of the two. But, did you know that you can manage any cloud resource in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform?

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Hello! This post covers using Pulumi to create the infrastructure for serving a static website on AWS. The full source code for this example is available on GitHub.

Setting up the infrastructure to serve a static website doesn’t sound like it would be all that difficult, but when you consider HTTPS certificates, content distribution networks, and attaching it to a custom domain, integrating all the components can be quite daunting.

Fortunately this is a task where Pulumi really shines. Pulumi’s code-centric approach not only makes configuring cloud resources easier to do and maintain, but it also eliminates the pain of integrating multiple products together.

This isn’t a hypothetical benefit of using the Pulumi programming model. We use a setup similar to the one described in this post for powering our own static websites, like www.pulumi.com and get.pulumi.com.

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At Pulumi, we do all of our development on GitHub, with a workflow built around topic branches. When a developer wants to make a change, they push a branch to GitHub, open a pull request and (in theory) once it’s merged, delete the branch. In practice, we’ll often forget to delete the topic branch (I’m probably the worst offender), which means we end up having topic branches linger on our main repository until they are explicitly cleaned up. While it’s a lot of fun to go a click through the GitHub UI from time to time, deleting merged branches, it’s even more fun to build automation to do this for us. Since GitHub has a rich set of webhooks and Pulumi makes it easy to write serverless functions, it felt like it would be natural to use Pulumi to write a hook that would clean up branches after a pull request got merged. In addition, Pulumi lets us leverage real programming languages to build abstractions, which means we can build a simple framework that hides much of the ceremony behind defining a hook and lets us focus on the core logic of our hook, without worrying about how it is deployed and managed.

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Two weeks ago Amazon added Simple Queue Service (SQS) as a supported event source for Lambda. SQS is one of AWS’s oldest services, providing access to a powerful message queue that can do things like guarantee messages will be delivered at least once, or messages that will be processed in the same order they were received in. Adding SQS as a supported event source for Lambda means that now it’s possible to use SQS in a serverless computing infrastructure, where Lambdas are triggered in response to messages added to your SQS queue. Now, instead of needing some sort of Service dedicated to polling your SQS queue, or creating Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications from your messages, you can instead just directly trigger whatever Lambda you want.

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In this tutorial, we’ll use Pulumi to build a complete serverless application using only JavaScript. When we say ‘using only JavaScript’, we’re not kidding:

• write code just like an Express app… but end up with a fully deployable serverless app
• lambdas are… just lambdas
• no YAML required… freedom from indentation
• all the features of the V8 runtime… async await ahoy
• all the behaviors of immutable infrastructure as code tools… but we really mean ‘as code’

Pulumi also supports containers (including Kubernetes), managed services, infrastructure and everything else in between that you might need for building cloud applications. Better than that, you can even combine them all in the same program.

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In this blog post, we’ll see how to run Jenkins on Kubernetes with Pulumi. We abstract away the complexity of the configuration into a reusable component to enable it to be reused by team mates. Our example is based on adapting a Helm template.

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