Overcoming the cost and complexity of mutli-cloud environments and managing infrastructure more effectively is a perpetual challenge. For thousands of companies growing Platform Engineering skills, the solution to these challenges may be closer than you think.
If a computer can be connected to the internet, someone has tried to run a container on it. From quantum computers to smart toasters, from phones in AWS racks to CI pipelines, there’s many ways to deploy containers. While most people only know about the mainstream cloud providers at the surface, there’s actually a vast world of increasingly unusual and specialized options beneath.
This guide serves two purposes: to showcase the surprising breadth of container options available today, and to help you understand the full spectrum of choices – from practical to very experimental. Whether you’re looking for production-ready solutions or just curious about what’s out there in the dark depths, you’ll find something interesting here.
In 2025, several trends will dominate cloud computing, driving innovation, efficiency, and scalability. From Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to AI/ML, platform engineering to multi-cloud and hybrid strategies, and security practices, let’s explore the 10 biggest emerging trends.
Managing secrets in a cloud-native environment can be challenging, but it is crucial for ensuring the security and integrity of any application or infrastructure. We encounter a lot of different types of secrets, from API keys, database passwords, and certificates to tokens and passwords. These secrets need to be stored securely and accessed by different services in a secure way without exposing any sensitive information to unauthorized users.
Here is where Pulumi ESC and External Secrets Operator come into play by providing a secure and efficient solution for cloud-native secret management.
In today’s complex digital landscape, organizations are increasingly turning to platform engineering to optimise their software delivery processes and maximize efficiency. The growing complexity of modern applications, coupled with the need for rapid, secure, and scalable deployments, has created a pressing demand for robust Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).
IDPs are a key component of modern platform engineering strategies. An IDP is a self-service layer that sits on top of an organization’s infrastructure, abstracting away complexity and providing developers with the tools and environments they need to build, test, and deploy applications efficiently.
Matt Stephenson is Senior Principal Software Engineer for Starburst Data and a Puluminary member. He’s deeply involved in the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) space, having contributed to Ansible, been a core contributor to Apache jclouds, and has written many Terraform plugins. He leads infrastructure architecture at Starburst and originally introduced Pulumi to the company. Starburst provides a data lake analytics platform that’s powered by Trino - an open-source distributed SQL query engine designed for running fast analytic queries across large datasets in multiple data sources. At Starburst, Matt helped revamp and improve how the company manages its multi-cloud and cloud native infrastructure.
Can’t make it to Valencia for KubeCon this year? Timezone doesn’t work for the virtual conference either? We can’t fix time, but if you’re feeling left out and still want some of that sweet cloud native content, you can still join us for KubeCrash, a new event hosting live crash courses and sessions on cloud native tech. Come hang out and learn directly from the maintainers of cloud native open source projects!
When you’re working with infrastructure, you’re inevitably going to need to upgrade or update that infrastructure. Whether it’s an operating system update or a desire to get CPU or memory upgrades, you will need the ability to pick resources and change them as necessary. In the past, this kind of upgrade would be done on the basis of individual resources, with each one being updated and checked either by hand or programmatically before moving onto the next resource. If you’ve ever done a database migration or if you ever did the recommended way of upgrading your computer’s operating system including all of the backup steps, you’re familiar with this process. Stand up the new resource. Check everything works. Move over the data. Check again. Tear down the old infrastructure. In a cloud computing environment, though, you’re often dealing with hundreds or thousands of resources, and doing one-by-one replacement is a nightmare that takes ages. However, there are other options, many borrowed from the application deployment world, that we have available to us because we write infrastructure as code.
This article references ksonnet, which was deprecated in 2019. For the most up-to-date information on using Pulumi with Kubernetes, see our Kubernetes documentation.
The Kubernetes landscape is constantly evolving as end users and developers search for the right tools, approaches, and abstractions to help them manage Cloud Native infrastructure in production.
On Feb 5, Heptio (now part of VMWare) announced that work on ksonnet, a project launched by Heptio, Box, Microsoft, and Bitnami, will stop. We’re sad to see ksonnet winding down, but are thankful for the collaborative exchange of ideas between projects, and are excited to see continued investment in VMWare/Heptio’s other projects. The good news is that, if you liked ksonnet, we’re confident that you’ll love Pulumi. In this post, we’ll tell you why.
The Pulumi ecosystem is continuously growing and today we’re excited to announce the F5 BIG-IP provider for Pulumi.
F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Managment (LTM) services provides advanced traffic management, acceleration, security, and analytics features to your applications. With the addition of our F5 BIG-IP Pulumi provider we are bringing Cloud Native Infrastructure as Code to F5 BIG-IP devices with familiar programming languages and a consistent programming model. This addresses a frequent use-case we’ve heard from our customers for both on-premises and Cloud workloads.
Let’s look at some examples to demonstrate what’s capable with this provider and the power and flexibility that Pulumi brings to working with your F5 BIG-IP systems.