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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With Pulumi, you can create, deploy, and manage any cloud resource using your favorite language. This includes application and infrastructure related resources, often in the same program.

One area this gets really fun is serverless. Because we’re using general purpose languages, we can create resources, and then wire up event handlers, just like normal event-driven programming. This is the way serverless should be!

In this article, we’ll see how. There’s a broad range of options depending on what you want to do, and how your team likes to operate. We’ll be using AWS and TypeScript, but other clouds and languages are available.

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Provisioning, managing, and monitoring a Kubernetes cluster is no easy task. AWS now offers EKS to ease a lot of that burden – but it’s still difficult to get up and running. Pulumi’s infrastructure as code to the rescue! We can now provision an entire EKS cluster with a CLI single gesture, thanks to the @pulumi/eks package. Let’s see how.

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One of Pulumi’s goals is to provide the simplest way possible to do serverless programming on AWS by enabling you to create cloud infrastructure with the real programming languages that you are already using today. We believe that the existing constructs already present in these languages, like flow control, inheritance, composition, and so on, provide the right abstractions to effectively build up infrastructure in a simple and familiar way.

In a previous post we focused on how Pulumi could allow you to simply create an AWS Lambda out of your own JavaScript function. While this was much easier than having to manually create a Lambda Deployment Package yourself, it could still be overly complex to integrate these Lambdas into complete serverless application.

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Pulumi is hosting a webinar with AWS Fargate on February 5th, 10AM PST (register here). We’ll be chatting about how to implement cloud native infrastructure across your organization using AWS and Pulumi: general purpose programming languages to deliver everything from VMs to Kubernetes to Serverless.

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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 real 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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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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Here at Pulumi we are (perhaps unsurprisingly!) huge fans of using Pulumi to manage our cloud infrastructure and services. We author our infrastructure in strongly-typed programming languages, which allows us to to benefit from rich tooling - documenting and factoring our infrastructure using the same software engineering practices we apply to our application code. This also allows us to create reusable abstractions which accelerate our ability to deliver new features and services, and our ability to standardize and refactor infrastructure patterns across our services with relative ease. 

Like other users, we use Pulumi at a variety of levels of abstraction. We use Pulumi for raw infrastructure provisioning, defining the core networking layer for our AWS-based backend infrastructure. And we use Pulumi to define how our application services are deployed into ECS using just a few lines of code. Pulumi hosts and manages static content for www.pulumi.com and get.pulumi.com. We use Pulumi to define the CloudWatch dashboards connected to our infrastructure. And for monitoring, Pulumi defines metrics and notifications/alarms in PagerDuty and Slack.

Best of all, we’ve been able to take things we’ve learned from these use cases, and others we’ve worked with beta users on over the last few months (thank you!), and factor common patterns out into reusable libraries like @pulumi/aws-infra and @pulumi/cloud for ourselves and others to build upon.

In this post, we’ll do a deeper dive into each of these use cases, highlighting unique aspects of how we use Pulumi itself, and some of our engineering processes around how we integrate Pulumi into the rest of our toolchain.

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