Posts Tagged cloud-engineering

Top 5 Things an Azure Developer Needs to Know: Serverless

Top 5 Things an Azure Developer Needs to Know: Serverless

The previous article was a deep dive into virtual machines. First, we used the Azure Portal to create and deploy a virtual machine; then, we repeated the process using infrastructure as code. We further demonstrated how to automate provisioning as part of cloud engineering’s build and deploy processes.

This article will explore the other end of the cloud infrastructure with serverless, which is an on-demand, fully-managed cloud architecture.

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Cloud Engineering on the Rise

Cloud Engineering on the Rise

One of the most fulfilling aspects of working at Pulumi is learning how customers and the community practice cloud engineering in their teams. It’s exciting to see how they use cloud engineering and Pulumi to implement best practices that enable leveraging the cloud to accelerate innovation and enable better business outcomes.

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What Exactly Is Cloud Engineering?

What Exactly Is Cloud Engineering?

When we think about the idea of “cloud engineering,” we often think about the concept of taking standard software engineering practices and tools, and making them available and consistent across development, infrastructure, and compliance teams.

It sounds a lot like what DevOps was supposed to accomplish, right? Many great practices have come out of software engineering that we can apply to operations and infrastructure. Likewise, practices from operational disciplines are equally applicable to development teams.

In cloud engineering, we look at how all of these practices are available to multiple functions and teams. It’s a compelling concept, and the more that we refactor our thinking around this, the more effective we can be at delivering value to our customers and users.

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Infrastructure Testing in Practice

Infrastructure Testing in Practice

In the previous article we discussed how to apply software testing methodologies to cloud engineering. We also examined testing regimes starting from the testing pyramid to the trophy and honeycomb models of testing better suited to distributed and cloud architectures. These testing regimes include three types of tests suited for cloud architectures:

  • unit tests for testing methods and functions within a service
  • property tests for validating specified service outputs
  • integration tests to ensure that resources interact as specified

In this article, we’ll do a deep dive into each of these testing methods.

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Testing Practices for Cloud Engineering

Testing Practices for Cloud Engineering

Cloud engineering brings industry-standard software development practices to building, deploying, and managing cloud infrastructure. Testing is a common practice for evaluating software to ensure that it meets requirements. Similarly, infrastructure testing checks for missing requirements, bugs, and errors; it also ensures security, reliability, and performance. Testing uses manual or automated tools to identify bugs that can cause unexpected infrastructure behavior.

There are many benefits to infrastructure testing, including:

  • reduced costs to fix bugs when caught early in the development lifecycle,
  • discovering security risks and problems earlier,
  • delivering a quality product that creates customer satisfaction through a great user experience

Testing shifts left the risk inherent with distributed architectures composed of many resources. Ultimately, testing increases release velocity, reliability, and confidence in your application.

This article is the first in a two-part series about testing infrastructure. The terminology for testing can be confusing because of broad definitions that overlap. This article will narrow those definitions that originated from application testing and apply them to infrastructure and cloud engineering. Let’s take a look at the different types of testing used with infrastructure as code.

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Refactoring Infrastructure as Code

Refactoring Infrastructure as Code

The central principle of cloud engineering is adopting software engineering practices. Refactoring is a technique for making changes to code that improve maintainability, enhance performance, scalability, and security without changing its external behavior. In devops, refactoring often occurs with modern applications; however, we can apply those same techniques to cloud infrastructure with infrastructure as code.

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Cloud Engineering: The Future Is Now

Cloud Engineering: The Future Is Now

Thank you for joining the PulumiUP event. We had a stellar set of speakers and panelists discussing the future of DevOps and how Cloud Engineering is providing the tools and processes that enable faster delivery, the right mix of architecture, and foster collaboration among teams in an organization. Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from our speakers.

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PulumiUP: the Event for Cloud Engineers

PulumiUP: the Event for Cloud Engineers

My professional background has included nearly ten years of managing field events and user conferences. I never thought I would say this, but I miss traveling. I even missed Vegas and AWS re:Invent this year. I miss connecting with customers and advocates in our communities. I wish we could all be looking forward to getting together in person in Seattle or Austin or insert any city here. As the year continued, it became clear we were not going back to in-person events anytime soon, and everyone in the industry pivoted to virtual programs while video conferencing became an all-day activity.

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Building a Development Environment for Cloud Engineering

Building a Development Environment for Cloud Engineering

Starting can be daunting. Before you take your first step, there’s a lot to consider, but you can prepare your development environment ahead of time to make your first steps in cloud engineering smooth and productive. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up your development environment to work across cloud providers, multiple languages, and different operating systems.

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The Past, Present, and Future of Cloud Engineering

The Past, Present, and Future of Cloud Engineering

All software is cloud software. All modern applications interact with the cloud in some way, whether it’s using cloud for storage, compute capabilities, or with rich cloud services for data, AI/ML, and so much more, to deliver amazing new experiences. As a result, all developers today are cloud developers, and infrastructure teams are key to enabling innovation across the entire organization. I had a great time telling this story at the Cloud Engineering Summit today and wanted to take a moment to put pen to paper.

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