Documentation in any product is super important, and an area where folks have shared a lot of feedback! We’ve heard you, and this week we took a major step in rolling out a brand new approach to resource documentation. We hope you like it as much as we do.
We’ve been hard at work making it easier to manage stacks, permissions, and organizations in the Pulumi Service. Adding new features like first-class support for stack tags, deep links into CI/CD providers, and downloadable checkpoint files.
In this post, we showcase what’s new!
We are excited to announce the release of Audit Logs on Pulumi for Enterprise organizations. Audit logs enable you to track the activity of users within an organization. They attempt to answer what a user did, when they did it and where. They help answer these questions by recording user actions.
Pulumi’s audit logs allow you to account for the activity your users are taking within your organization. These logs are available to organizations with an Enterprise level subscription. The logs are immutable and and record all user actions. Auditing makes the activity of members in an organization attributable. The logs capture the UNIX timestamp of the event, the user who invoked the action, the event that took place, and the source IP of the call the user made.
Pulumi has many resource providers that allow you to interact with your favorite cloud or resource. There are times when a provider may not deliver on the specific task that you want to accomplish. Dynamic Providers can be a powerful tool to help accomplish your infrastructure tasks.
A big part of our vision with Pulumi is to bring application developers and infrastructure teams closer together in the cloud. That includes both providing infrastructure teams with better software engineering tools, as well as providing developers with easier access to cloud infrastructure. We are often inspired by looking at great software engineering experiences in other development stacks and applying them to the cloud infrastructure space. Whether it be general-purpose languages and rich IDEs, testing and package management, or components and rich APIs, at Pulumi, we’ve repeatedly applied successful development tools and practices to the challenges of building and scaling modern cloud infrastructure.
This blog post discusses CrossGuard in “preview” status. CrossGuard is now fully released and integrated into Pulumi. For current information about Pulumi’s policy as code capabilities, please refer to the latest CrossGuard documentation.
Over the past few months, we have been hard at work on Pulumi CrossGuard, a Policy as Code solution. Using CrossGuard, you can express flexible business and security rules using code. CrossGuard enables organization administrators to enforce these policies across their organization or just on specific stacks. CrossGuard allows you to verify or enforce custom policies on changes before they are applied to your resources. CrossGuard is 100% open source and available to all users of Pulumi, including the Individual Edition. Advanced organization-wide policy management features are available to Enterprise customers.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” William Shakespeare’s oft repeated quote was used to help Juliet explain that a “Montague” is worthy of love. Juliet may have underestimated the importance of a name, however, since things didn’t work out so well for everyone in Verona! Many customers have questions about “names” in Pulumi – and in an effort to make sure that things work out better for them than they did for Romeo, here’s a quick note on naming!
While some people coming to Pulumi are entirely new to Infrastructure as Code, increasingly teams are moving from other tools - whether cloud-specific in the form of CloudFormation or ARM Templates, or cloud-agnostic tools such as Terraform. In these organizations, new infrastructure provisioned with Pulumi must co-exist with existing resources provisioned with other tools, and often by different teams. For example, it’s common to see an application team deploying into a VPC owned and managed by a network operations team.
Pulumi supports
this kind of workflow
natively using the StackReference
type from the Pulumi SDK. Integration with the most popular
cloud-specific tools have been supported by Pulumi since the earliest
days:
The aws.cloudformation.getStack()
function can be used to obtain the outputs from a CloudFormation
Stack.
The get
method of the
azure.core.SubscriptionTemplateDeployment
class can be used to obtain the outputs of an ARM Template Deployment.
We recently added similar support for reading the outputs of a Terraform
state file - both from local .tfstate files, and from all of the
remote state backends supported by Terraform. This is exposed via the
terraform.state.RemoteStateReference type in the
@pulumi/terraform
NPM package.
We’ve had a 1st class concept of encrypted secrets configuration ever since first releasing Pulumi. Customers have told us they love having such a simple and easy way to ensure safe management of tokens, database passwords, and more. Since launching, however, we’ve also heard that you’d like more control over encryption and to see this protection expanded to cover not just configuration, but all of the secret data within their Pulumi deployments.
To support this, we’ve added two new features to Pulumi in our latest 0.17.12 release:
Together, these features provide you with complete control over how secrets are managed within Pulumi deployments. We have worked with customers with advanced security and compliance needs while developing this feature, enabling them to use our online hosted SaaS with even greater confidence.
Azure DevOps is very popular among teams that want a single place to manage their development pipelines, Git repositories, builds, releases, and test plans. Pulumi’s open-source tools are a great choice for developers and operators deploying infrastructure as code on Azure. With these two tools at hand, adopting CI and CD for your Azure infrastructure is just a few steps away for you and your teams.
To make it easy to use Pulumi with Azure, we are announcing an open-source task extension for Azure Pipelines! The task extension will manage the installation of the Pulumi CLI, and run the Pulumi commands you specify against your stack.