Posts Tagged azure

Today’s guest post is from Mikhail Shilkov, a Microsoft Azure MVP and early Pulumi user and contributor - enjoy!

Today I want to guide you through the process of developing Pulumi programs to leverage Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) services. My language of choice is TypeScript—a powerful and expressive typed language, which is very familiar to many Azure users.

Azure Platform as a Service

Azure consists of dozens of cloud services, from VMs to Kubernetes to Serverless. In my experience, a lot of customers choose Azure for its strong portfolio of PaaS-level services.

Azure App Service is a well-established managed compute offering to run web applications, RESTful APIs, or background workers. Azure SQL Database is a fully managed service to run relational databases with features like high availability and backups available out-of-the-box. Enriched by services like Azure DevOps for CI/CD and Application Insights for APM, PaaS is a powerful way to get the benefits of the cloud without the need to fully re-architect software solutions.

The power of relying on PaaS is evidenced by significant customer adoption. App Service is among the most popular compute services in Azure:

If you use automation (ARM, scripts, TF, …) to define and deploy Azure infrastructure, which services are your primary target? Vote & RT!

– Mikhail Shilkov (@MikhailShilkov) April 23, 2019

Nonetheless, PaaS services pose different challenges to application developers. In particular, the usage of multiple cloud services demands an investment in infrastructure automation. That’s where Pulumi comes to the rescue.

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Azure DevOps is very popular among teams that want a single place to manage their development pipelines, Git repositories, builds, releases, and test plans. Pulumi’s open-source tools are a great choice for developers and operators deploying infrastructure as code on Azure. With these two tools at hand, adopting CI and CD for your Azure infrastructure is just a few steps away for you and your teams.

To make it easy to use Pulumi with Azure, we are announcing an open-source task extension for Azure Pipelines! The task extension will manage the installation of the Pulumi CLI, and run the Pulumi commands you specify against your stack.

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The Helm community is one of the brightest spots in the infrastructure ecosystem: collectively, it has accumulated person-decades of operational expertise to produce Kubernetes manifests that “just work.”

But for many users, it is not feasible to run everything in Kubernetes, and the community is just starting to develop answers to questions like: what happens when a Helm Chart needs to interface with, for example, a managed database like AWS RDS or Azure CosmosDB?

Pulumi is a cloud native development platform designed to be able to express any cloud native infrastructure as code in a natural, intentional manner using familiar languages. The most natural way to solve this challenge would be to stand up an instance of AWS RDS, populate a Kubernetes Secret with the connection details, and then simply let my application use these newly available resources. Pulumi gives users the primitives they need in order to achieve tasks like this most effectively.

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