Ask a generic LLM to “fix my broken deployment,” and you’ll get generic advice. Ask Pulumi Neo the same question, and you’ll get a fix plan grounded in your actual infrastructure state.
The difference isn’t about better prompts or newer models. It’s about what the AI actually knows. Generic LLMs have been trained on the internet. Neo has been trained on your infrastructure.
Welcome to the fourth post in our IDP Best Practices series. Today we’re diving into the world of drift detection and remediation, those critical day 2 operations that keep your infrastructure aligned with its intended configuration long after the initial deployment.
You’ve built a beautiful platform with robust guardrails, comprehensive templates, and well-defined golden paths. Your developers are productive, deployments are smooth, and everything seems perfect. Then reality hits. An on-call engineer makes an emergency change through the AWS console during a 3 AM incident. A team member tweaks a security group rule to debug a connection issue and forgets to revert it. Auto-scaling adjusts capacity based on load patterns. Before you know it, your actual infrastructure has quietly diverged from what your code describes.
Developers are losing days every month to infrastructure bottlenecks, compliance hurdles, and inconsistent environments. Platform engineering promised to fix that, yet too many platforms fail before they deliver real impact.
In this comparison of Backstage vs Pulumi IDP, we’ll explore why choosing the right architectural approach matters more than the tool itself.
It’s funny how technology has a way of sneaking back into your life just when you think you’ve moved on for good. Jenkins and I have quite the history. Think of it as that reliable but slightly temperamental friend from your college days who you haven’t seen in years.
Every modern application depends on secrets to function: database passwords, API keys, certificates, and configuration values that enable secure communication between services. But here’s the challenge: as your infrastructure grows, managing these secrets becomes exponentially more complex.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has evolved beyond simple automation into a fundamental shift toward applying software engineering practices to infrastructure management. In 2025, leading organizations aren’t just provisioning infrastructure—they’re treating it as software, complete with testing, version control, code reviews, and continuous integration.
Kubernetes has undeniably transformed the way we build, ship, and run applications. But let’s be honest, getting started with Kubernetes can feel like climbing Mount Everest in flip-flops.
As a cloud-native citizen and Kubernetes enthusiast, I’ve learned the hard way that there are a bunch of “wish I had known that earlier” best practices. They could have saved me time, money, and headaches.
Have you ever had one of those moments: Elasticsearch is crashing, logs are filling up too fast, or a deployment needs data from three different APIs. The big enterprise solutions aren’t quite right, and your team estimates six months to build something proper. But you know that with Python and a few choice libraries, you could hack something together by tomorrow.
Platform engineering has become essential for mid-to-large organizations, moving beyond a DevOps trend. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software companies will have internal platform services to streamline development. The goal is to empower developers with self-service tools while maintaining security, compliance, and reliability through DevSecOps practices.
At PulumiUP Europe 2024, experts shared insights on aligning DevOps with security to build scalable, secure platforms:
The panel discussed key strategies, challenges, and pillars of successful platform engineering.
In one of my recent talks, I mentioned that the foundation of a successful Kubernetes-powered platform is the use of Kubernetes Operators, as they are a great way to automate operational tasks and the lifecycle of complex applications and services on Kubernetes.