Posts Tagged containers

Pulumi and Docker: Development to Production

Here at Pulumi, we’re big fans of Docker: at this point there is little doubt that Docker has completely revolutionized the way that we think about deploying software. However, even in 2019, it’s quite difficult to get Docker containers to production. docker run is great, and we all love it, but unfortunately it’s quite a big leap from docker run to running your container in a production-ready environment.

We recently wrote a blog post about using AWS Fargate to run your docker containers with our open source packages. In this blog post we’re going to focus on another interesting aspect of Pulumi: being able to re-use your infrastructure code for both development and production!

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Get Started with Docker on AWS Fargate using Pulumi

Get Started with Docker on AWS Fargate using Pulumi

Some of the code in this post is out of date. See the AWS guides for an updated overview and examples.

Update: Check out the Learning Machine Case Study where provisioning went from 3 weeks to 1 hour with Pulumi and AWS.

“The impact of serverless capabilities was also transformative for the Learning Machine business. Pulumi enabled a rapid shift to Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda — the net effect of which was a 67% reduction in AWS charges. This enabled the team to spend less time focused on maintaining existing infrastructure and more time deploying new applications on AWS and adding new customers.

Pulumi is the foundational technology that allowed us to transform our organization,” said Hughes. The entire DevOps process was streamlined and in addition to realizing better productivity and higher quality, the team has new insight into their SaaS offering that they never thought possible.”

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Program the Cloud with 12 Pulumi Pearls

In this post, we’ll look at 12 “pearls” – bite-sized code snippets – that demonstrate some fun ways you can program the cloud using Pulumi. In my introductory post, I mentioned a few of my “favorite things”. Now let’s dive into a few specifics, from multi-cloud to cloud-specific, spanning containers, serverless, and infrastructure, and generally highlighting why using familiar languages is so empowering for cloud scenarios. Since Pulumi lets you do infrastructure-as-code from the lowest-level to the highest, we will cover a lot of interesting ground in short order.

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How we use Pulumi to build Pulumi

How we use Pulumi to build Pulumi

Here at Pulumi we are (perhaps unsurprisingly!) huge fans of using Pulumi to manage our cloud infrastructure and services. We author our infrastructure in strongly-typed programming languages, which allows us to to benefit from rich tooling - documenting and factoring our infrastructure using the same software engineering practices we apply to our application code. This also allows us to create reusable abstractions which accelerate our ability to deliver new features and services, and our ability to standardize and refactor infrastructure patterns across our services with relative ease.

Like other users, we use Pulumi at a variety of levels of abstraction. We use Pulumi for raw infrastructure provisioning, defining the core networking layer for our AWS-based backend infrastructure. And we use Pulumi to define how our application services are deployed into ECS using just a few lines of code. Pulumi hosts and manages static content for www.pulumi.com and get.pulumi.com. We use Pulumi to define the CloudWatch dashboards connected to our infrastructure. And for monitoring, Pulumi defines metrics and notifications/alarms in PagerDuty and Slack.

Best of all, we’ve been able to take things we’ve learned from these use cases, and others we’ve worked with beta users on over the last few months (thank you!), and factor common patterns out into reusable libraries like @pulumi/aws-infra and @pulumi/cloud for ourselves and others to build upon.

In this post, we’ll do a deeper dive into each of these use cases, highlighting unique aspects of how we use Pulumi itself, and some of our engineering processes around how we integrate Pulumi into the rest of our toolchain.

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Build a Video Thumbnailer on AWS

Build a Video Thumbnailer on AWS

Pulumi makes it easy to build cloud applications that use a combination of containers, lambdas, and connected data services and infrastructure: Colada apps.

An example of a Colada app is extracting a thumbnail from a video. A serverless function can only run for 5 minutes, so we’ll run a container in AWS Fargate to do the video processing.

In this app, a Lambda function is triggered whenever a new video is uploaded to S3. This function launches a task in Fargate that uses FFmpeg to extract a video thumbnail. A second Lambda function is triggered when a new thumbnail has been created.

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Deploying production-ready containers with Pulumi

Deploying production-ready containers with Pulumi

Containers are a great way to deploy applications to the cloud, especially with new execution models like AWS Fargate. Pulumi makes it easy to deploy production Docker containers, handling details such as creating a container registry instance in ECR, creating task definitions in ECS, and configuring a load balancer. With Pulumi, deploying a container to production is almost as easy as running it locally! In this blog post, we’ll deploy a simple Docker container running NGINX.

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