Posts Tagged AWS

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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Pulumi makes it easy to build serverless applications and connect to other cloud resources. In this blog post, we’ll create a simple REST API that counts the number of times a route has been hit, using JavaScript to define both the infrastructure and application code. In Pulumi, you define your application infrastructure in regular code, using JavaScript, Python or Go, and you can target AWS, Azure, GCP, or Kubernetes. The Pulumi command line tool transforms your into a declarative plan, following the best practices of immutable infrastructure.

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Pulumi makes it easy to build cloud applications that use a combination of containers, lambdas, and connected data services and infrastructure: Colada apps. 

An example of a Colada app is extracting a thumbnail from a video. A serverless function can only run for 5 minutes, so we’ll run a container in AWS Fargate to do the video processing. 

In this app, a Lambda function is triggered whenever a new video is uploaded to S3. This function launches a task in Fargate that uses FFmpeg to extract a video thumbnail. A second Lambda function is triggered when a new thumbnail has been created. 

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Containers are a great way to deploy applications to the cloud, especially with new execution models like AWS Fargate. Pulumi makes it easy to deploy production Docker containers, handling details such as creating a container registry instance in ECR, creating task definitions in ECS, and configuring a load balancer. With Pulumi, deploying a container to production is almost as easy as running it locally! In this blog post, we’ll deploy a simple Docker container running NGINX.

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