Recently, Pulumi community member Josh Graham decided to bootstrap a simple application using a serverless approach, with a focus on using good engineering practices and being able to run the application locally. Given that Josh is the (OG) SaaS architect of Atlassian and an AWS user, LocalStack was a natural choice.
As somebody who works on AWS projects across numerous projects, teams, and industries; I see the following three common types of infrastructure problems. I think the Pulumi Registry provides an incredible solution to each of these problems and will fundamentally change how people interact with AWS.
Cloud engineering is taking over software development. In a lot of ways, this is great; it allows us to build and deploy more complicated applications with less difficulty, and maintaining those applications becomes less troublesome too. We can release smaller updates more quickly than ever, ensuring that we can stay on top of feature requests and security issues. That said, the rise of cloud engineering has also introduced a lot of complexity in the form of dozens of services even within just one cloud provider. Figuring out where to start can be tough, so let’s take a practical tour! In this series, I’ll walk you through building a personal website and deploying it using modern cloud engineering practices.
We are excited to announce the release of the new AWS Native provider for Pulumi, which is available today in preview. AWS is the most-used cloud provider across the Pulumi ecosystem, and with the new AWS Native provider, we are focused on delivering the best possible support for the AWS platform to all Pulumi users.
Pulumi Native Providers like AWS Native are a new type of Pulumi Package that give you the most complete and consistent interface for the modern cloud. Pulumi native providers bring the full power of the top cloud providers to the Pulumi Cloud Engineering Platform, with faster updates and more complete coverage than any other infrastructure as code offering.
The AWS Native provider offers same-day support for all new AWS features and releases covered by the newly released AWS Cloud Control API, which typically supports new AWS features on the day of launch. By building on the AWS Cloud Control API, the AWS Native provider offers a robust, reliable and well-defined resource model for AWS that’s available to Pulumi users in all Pulumi languages, including TypeScript, Python, Go and C#. By leveraging the AWS Cloud Control API, the AWS Native provider builds on the work done by service teams at AWS to define the resource model for their services. This ensures a rock solid provisioning lifecycle for resources deployed with the AWS Native provider.
In late 2018, AWS launched their first EC2 instances powered by ARM-based AWS Graviton Processors. These instances had been optimized for performance and cost. Since that initial launch, Amazon has continued to innovate in the Graviton space. In June 2021, they launched the Graviton Challenge for users to move their applications to AWS Graviton2. AWS Graviton2 processor instance types are up to 20% lower cost than x86 based instance types and see up to 40% better price performance.
![How to Use ECS Anywhere with Pulumi [Step-by-Step Guide]](/blog/ecs-anywhere-launch/ecs_anywhere.png)
@pulumi/awsx). For updated AWSx documentation and examples, see the AWS Guides.When Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) first launched in 2014, it enabled an easy and convenient way of deploying and scheduling containers in the AWS ecosystem. Back then, you would run a set of EC2 instances, and ECS would deploy containers to instances based on the size, resources, and placement requirements you specified.
There are loads of benefits to packaging up an application as a container. You can ensure that your application has all the required dependencies and runs in the isolated, predictable environment you expect. When it comes to running that containerized application, there are many options, including Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), and Docker. Often, running a container application at scale requires setting up a container orchestrator and providing network infrastructure to the containers. Configuring this can be complex, especially if you’re not familiar with virtual networking concepts such as virtual private clouds, load balancers, and the like.
I was relieved to find Pulumi. Finally, we have testable Infrastructure as Code. We can write fast unit tests that we can execute locally without needing the cloud. However, I was a bit disappointed. Pulumi does not have a full representation of IAM Policy documents. Fortunately, it was relatively easy to build a library that did this!
Danny Zalkind is the DevOps group manager for Skai, an award-winning intelligent marketing platform. He brings his 15 years of exprience of managing tech teams to his current role where he’s dedicated to allow Skai R&D to efficiently produce and serve software. You can find him on Linkedin.
Skai is an independent, global marketing platform for strategy, measurement, and best-of-breed activation across all of the world’s most influential digital channels. Skai’s solution provides data-driven insights and optimization technology to help companies make informed decisions and scale performance across critical publishers.
Skai possesses a highly technical engineering organization with over 350 software engineers, data experts, and DevOps engineers.
In this article, I’ll show how Pulumi can be used with Aiven’s services to create infrastructure that can be migrated from cloud to cloud with no downtime.
This tutorial will use Python, Pulumi, Grafana, and an AWS Lambda function to simulate recording temperature data in an InfluxDB database.