On a regular basis, articles and tweets pass by discussing whether some specific tool is imperative or declarative.
It’s no surprise that Pulumi is often the tool being debated. What if I tell you that Pulumi is imperative, declarative and imperative?
At PulumiUP 2022, Tomas Jansson, software architect at Elkjøp Nordic, gave a presentation on how to enable developers to self-service infrastructure by using Pulumi’s Automation API.
Elkjøp Nordic is the leading consumer electronics retailer in the Nordics. The company sells consumer electronics, mobile phones, computers, white goods, domestic appliances, and services linked to these products both directly to consumers and to businesses. It is an omnichannel retailer and serves customers both online and through more than 400 stores. Elkjøp has retail outlets in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, and franchise operations in Greenland and Faroe Islands.
Infrastructure has become a core part of application development as modern cloud capabilities such as microservices, containers, serverless, and data stores define your application’s architecture. The term “infrastructure” covers all of the cloud resources your application needs to run. Modern architectures require thinking deeply about infrastructure while building your application, instead of treating it as an afterthought. Pulumi’s approach helps developers, infrastructure engineers, and platform teams work together to leverage everything the modern cloud has to offer.
What do assembly languages and the cloud have in common? Are abstractions the future of cloud computing? What does “infrastructure” really mean? And why do these questions matter to the platform engineers, infrastructure engineers, and developers who are building modern cloud applications today?
Joe Duffy (Founder & CEO, Pulumi) and James Governor (Co-founder, RedMonk) recently answered these questions and more in a conversation about developer-first infrastructure. Developer-first infrastructure means empowering developers to build and deploy modern cloud applications and infrastructure through the use of software engineering practices that tame modern cloud complexity.
As a reader of this blog, you’ve probably heard of the Pulumi Service, the default state-management backend of the Pulumi CLI, and if that’s the case, there’s a good chance you’ve also heard of many of its key features. But did you know we’re adding new features to the Service all the time—some of which are incredibly easy to miss? In this post, we’ll highlight a few of those lesser-known features that we think make it even easier to manage your infrastructure with Pulumi.
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.
As a customer engineer, one of the most rewarding aspects of my work is to listen to customers and our diverse community to learn and share how they succeed in their day-to-day projects.
In this 3-article mini-series, we’re going to explore some of the recommended patterns used in the Pulumi community and the benefits of using those patterns. We’ll kick off with all the basic patterns to get you started. Next, as you progress into cloud engineering, we’ll go deeper into evolved patterns. We’ll then conclude this mini-series with cloud engineering practices to augment and accelerate how you approach cloud software.
Pulumi offers the most complete infrastructure as code platform for building, deploying, and managing modern cloud infrastructure and applications. When you use Pulumi, a vast library of cloud resources—from compute, storage, and other cloud infrastructure to databases to identity providers to monitoring systems—is at your fingertips. As the Pulumi community has grown, we’ve heard from many of you that we needed a central hub where you could find all of those resources. We’ve also heard from Pulumi partners that they wanted a great place to showcase their integrations with Pulumi so that their customers can more easily learn how to use Pulumi to deploy and manage their products.
Today, we’re excited to launch Pulumi Registry, the one place to discover and share everything you can achieve using Pulumi. Pulumi Registry is a searchable collection of Pulumi Packages published by Pulumi and our partners. With Pulumi Registry, you can easily find the package with the resources you need, install that package directly into your project, and start building. You can choose from Providers that give you full access to everything a cloud provider has to offer, or choose a Component that gets you started quickly with best practices and sensible defaults baked in. All Pulumi Packages are available in all Pulumi languages, so you can build your infrastructure using C#, Go, Python, and TypeScript/JavaScript. You’ll also find all of the documentation you need to succeed: from detailed API reference to how-to guides with source code for specific use cases.
The story of how the cloud fuels startup innovation seems never ending. In the beginning, AWS birthed cloud computing with its first service, SQS, in 2004 and quickly released several additional services (like S3, EC2, and SimpleDB). From this innovation, startups flourished because they were able to build, experiment, and grow faster than before at much lower cost. Airbnb, Netflix, Zynga, and many more were born, and the rest is history.
The Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is coming up fast, and the speakers are out! To get you ready to attend, let’s take a look at the sessions for the Build track.
The Cloud Engineering Summit’s three tracks are built around three concepts: Build, Manage, and Deploy. I’m Kat Cosgrove, and I was responsible for selecting your speakers for the Build track! For us, that means building cloud applications and infrastructure with Modern Infrastructure as Code using general purpose programming languages. We embrace the fact that modern cloud applications have blurred the lines between the application and the infrastructure, and that success requires at least some level of proficiency in both. Whether you’re full stack or lean more towards one area, all cloud engineers apply a software engineering mindset and practices to building and testing applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. This includes using standard programming languages, applying software principles such as reusability and abstractions and testing, and leveraging the rich ecosystem of software development tools.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at each of the talks I’ve selected for you!