Pulumi Blog: Pulumi events

PulumiUP 2024: Dive Into the Future of Cloud, Platform Engineering, and AI/ML

Sara Huddleston — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 07:04:40 +0000

PulumiUP 2024 is just around the corner! It will be held on September 18th, starting at 8 AM PT | 15:00 UTC +0, and with over 5,500 engineers from all over the world already registered, this is shaping up to be the must-attend event for cloud professionals, platform engineers, and AI/ML enthusiasts alike. From entry-level engineers to tech executives, this event brings together professionals from companies of all sizes to explore the latest innovations and best practices in Cloud and IaC, Platform Engineering & DevOps, and AI/ML.

If you haven’t registered yet, now’s the time! Start building your schedule today, select the talks you want to watch live and on-demand and add them to your schedule.

PulumiUP at Glance

Main Track: Keynote, Cloud Culture Talks, and More

In the Main Track, you’ll hear directly from the Pulumi leadership team about exciting product innovations. Don’t miss the Cloud Culture talks focused on the human side of technology and collaboration.

Keynote and New Product Announcements - Joe Duffy (Co-founder and CEO), Luke Hoban (CTO), and other key Pulumi leaders will unveil new products and innovations shaping the next wave of cloud development. Expect to see live demos showcasing how these tools can revolutionize your workflows, from cloud infrastructure to security automation.
"Why Care About Building a Cloud Center of Excellence?" - Alex Radu (VP Product & Marketing Manager, Public Cloud, J.P. Morgan) discusses why building a Cloud Center of Excellence is essential for long-term cloud strategy success.
"What Is ‘HugOps’ and Why Is It Important?" - Rees Pozzi (Senior Platform Engineer, Kainos) explores the meaning and importance of “HugOps,” a practice promoting empathy and collaboration in the tech world but also by all those impacted by it.

AI/ML Track Highlights

Panel: AI for Cloud Development

AI is transforming how we approach development and infrastructure, and PulumiUP offers an incredible lineup of talks and panels on the topic.

"Data Privacy Challenges with Large Language Models" - Aditi Godbole (Data Science, AI & ML Leader, SAP) will address the critical question of managing data privacy, addressing LLM basics, AI data privacy fundamentals, and specific privacy issues in LLMs.
"Pulumi Powered AI/ML on Kubernetes" - Jason Smith (App Modernization Specialist, Google Cloud) will show you how to serve an open-source LLM with a RAG on Kubernetes and set up a Kubernetes environment for AI/ML workloads with Pulumi.
"AI Tools for Developers" - Jim Clark (Principal Software Engineer, Docker) will explore how Tools can enhance the capabilities of AI assistants and show how the combination of AI, Tools, and containerized runtimes, can enhance interactions between developers and their tools.
"The AI Governance Challenge" - Patty O’Callaghan (Technical Director, Charles River) will explore the complexities of AI governance and how to navigate them.
Panel Discussion: “AI for Cloud Development” - Luke Hoban (CTO, Pulumi), Phillip Carter (Principal Product Manager, Honeycomb), Giri Sreenivas (CPO, Docker), Clare Liguori (Senior Principal Software Engineer, AWS) and Meagan Cojocar (Principal Product Manager, Pulumi) will provide diverse perspectives on how AI is shaping cloud infrastructure.

Platform Engineering and DevOps Track Highlights

Panel: Secrets and Policies—Automating Cybersecurity

The Platform Engineering & DevOps track at PulumiUP is perfect for anyone looking to automate infrastructure, secure their systems, and scale their environments with ease. This track features talks and panels on cutting-edge technologies and practices.

"Moving Mountains: How IaC Unlocks Massive Refactoring Possibilities" - Shaun Verch (Infrastructure Engineer, Oso) will show you how infrastructure as code can transform large-scale refactoring projects.
"Using Pulumi to Empower Kubernetes Fleet Management" - Blake Romano (Senior Software Engineer, Imagine Learning) will show you how Imagine Learning leverages Pulumi to manage a fleet of Kubernetes clusters and other platform resources quickly and reliably, and how it revolutionized their workflow.
"Streamline Your Infrastructure Deployment with GitOps and Pulumi Operator" - Sam Cogan (Solutions Architect & Azure MVP, WTW) will highlight how you can define your infrastructure in Git, and have Pulumi automatically reconcile it into deployed infrastructure.
"Is This a Platform? Platform Engineering Before PMF" - Jk Jensen (Team Lead, Staff Software Engineer, MystenLabs) will share how they built their service platform around Pulumi to help engineers and researchers move from prototypes to deployed environments, enabling their teams to iterate more quickly and develop an increasing number of systems without additional complexity.
"Security Automation—Faster. Cheaper. Better." - David Giambruno (VP of Engineering and DevOps, Tivity Health) and Joe Duffy (Founder/CEO, Pulumi) will discuss security automation and how these efforts impacted speed and agility, cost optimization and improved security and compliance.
"Meet Devs Where They Are: Why IaC Must Be Real Code" - Jeremy Adams (Head of Ecosystems, Dagger) will present why real code (that teams already use for applications) is essential for both IaC and CI/CD pipelines, and to meet modern DevOps best practices.
"Security of IaC Pipelines and Infrastructure Governance With Policies-As-Code" - Marina Novikova (Senior Partner Solutions Architect, AWS) and Andy Taylor (Senior Networking Specialist/ Solutions Architect, AWS) will explore security best practices for IaC pipelines and infrastructure governance using policies-as-code, cover best practices for handling sensitive information like access keys, tokens and encryption keys, and scaling and automating your DevSecOps.
Panel Discussion: “Secrets and Policies—Automating Cybersecurity” - Arun Loganathan (Senior Product Manager, Pulumi), Maya Kaczorowski (PM of Security), Jason Meller (VP, Product, 1Password), and Ofir Cohen (CTO, Container Security, Wiz) will explore the intersection of innovation and security, offering insights into how AI is reshaping the threat landscape and how organizations can stay ahead.

Cloud and IaC Track Highlights

Panel: Infrastructure as Code - Can we do better?

The Cloud and IaC track is ideal for those wanting to deepen their understanding of infrastructure as code and its impact on modern cloud computing. Learn from industry pioneers and see where the future of IaC is headed.

"From CDK to Pulumi: Evolution of SST" - Dax Raad (Founding Engineer, SST) and Jay V (Founder, SST) will share insights into the early development of their product, initially built on AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), the challenges they encountered and the groundbreaking decision to transition to Pulumi.
"Unified Software Development at BMW Software Factory with Pulumi" - Jan-Peter Alten (Expert Software Engineer, DevOps, BMW Group) will showcase how BMW uses Pulumi to unify their software development processes, resulting in an increase in developer productivity, streamlined infrastructure management, and enhanced scalability, security, and compliance across their complex software ecosystem.
"Stacking Accounts: Multi-Account Deployments in a Single Stack for Monitoring, Management, and More" - Denis Willett (Software Engineer, North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies) will explain how they use Pulumi for managing 60+PB of environmental data across AWS, GCP, and Azure and leverage multi-account deployments in a single stack via the Pulumi Automation API.
"Industrialize the Configuration of Your GitHub Repositories With IaC" - Alexandre Nédélec (Software Engineer, Avanade) will live code using the GitHub, Azure native, and Azure AD Pulumi providers to create a GitHub repository and configure its pipeline to deploy to Azure using OpenID Connect.
Panel Discussion: “Infrastructure as Code — Can We Do Better?” - Joe Duffy (Co-Founder and CEO, Pulumi), Brian Grant (CTO, Stealth), Elad Ben-Israel (Co-Founder and CEO, Winglang), Adam Jacob (Co-Founder and CEO, System Initiative), and Luke Hoban (CTO, Pulumi) will discuss the past, the present, and the future of Infrastructure as Code and the overall infrastructure technologies.

Workshops and Hands-On Learning

Want to get hands-on experience? Our live workshops are designed to deepen your understanding of trending topics, Pulumi, and its applications.

"Managing Team Secrets with 1Password & Pulumi ESC" on September 25, led by Phil Johnston (1Password) and Diana Esteves (Pulumi).
"Securing IaC Pipelines in Regulated Industries" on September 26, led by Josh Kodroff (Pulumi) and Marina Novikova (AWS).
"Deploy Tailscale infrastructure in AWS with Pulumi" on October 15, led by Diana Esteves (Pulumi) and Lee Briggs (Tailscale).
"Observability as Code for AI Apps with New Relic and Pulumi" on October 30, led by Diana Esteves (Pulumi) and Harry Kimpel (New Relic).

Amazing Partners and Sponsors

Thank you to our amazing customers, sponsors, and partners for supporting PulumiUP!

AWS The world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.
Google Cloud Help developers build quickly, securely, and cost effectively with the next generation of modern infrastructure designed to meet specific workload and industry needs.
New Relic Data for engineers to monitor, debug, and improve their entire stack.
Docker Accelerate how you build, share, and run applications.
1Password Streamline how you manage SSH keys, API tokens, and other infrastructure secrets throughout the entire software development life cycle.
Tailscale Make creating software-defined networks easy: securely connecting users, services, and devices.
Pinecone Build remarkable GenAI applications fast, with lower cost, better performance, and greater ease of use at any scale.
Wiz Secure everything you build and run in the cloud.
Honeycomb Observability that helps solve problems you couldn’t before.
Mysten Labs Building critical infrastructure to enable a more decentralized internet.
Imagine Learning Empowering educators to inspire breakthrough moments in every student’s unique learning journey with digital-first, K–12 education solutions.
Dagger Powerful, programmable open source CI/CD engine that runs your pipelines in containers.
Oso Authorization as a service.

Build Your Schedule Now

With so many compelling topics across AI/ML, Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Cloud and IaC, now is the time to build your PulumiUP schedule. Select the sessions that match your goals and interests to maximize your experience. Plus, you’ll receive a link to watch your chosen panel discussions and tech talks on-demand!

Haven’t registered yet? It’s not too late! Join 5,500 engineers worldwide in this groundbreaking event and gain the insights you need to drive innovation at your company. Register now->

We can’t wait to see you there!

Platform Engineering: Cloud-Native, Maturity Models, and Platforms as Products

Sara Huddleston — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:40:17 +0000

The Platform Engineering & DevOps in-person series launched in Berlin with two great speakers. This blog article is an overview of Dominik Kress’s talk, “What the Heck is the CNCF Platform Working Group? Answers from a Member!” in which he discussed Cloud-Native Platforms, The Platform Maturity Model, and approaching Platforms as Products.

In this article, you’ll learn more about platform engineering and how to get involved with the CNCF Platform Working Group. Make sure to check our Pulumi User Groups (PUGs) to find a meetup near you.

On this platform engineering article:

What is a Platform?

According to CNCF, a platform in cloud-native computing is an integrated collection of capabilities designed to meet users’ needs. It serves as a cross-cutting layer, ensuring a consistent experience integrating and managing services and capabilities for various applications and use cases. A good platform provides consistent user experiences through portals, project templates, and self-service APIs.

Atlassian describes platform teams as creators of capabilities used by multiple product teams, reducing their overhead and cognitive load. Martin Fowler and Evan Bottcher define a digital platform as a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, and support arranged as an internal product. These platforms enable autonomous teams to deliver features faster with less coordination.

The specific capabilities of a platform are tailored to the needs of its stakeholders and users. While platform teams provide these capabilities, they do not always implement them directly. Managed service providers or dedicated internal teams can maintain the underlying implementations, ensuring consistency across the organization. Platforms are tailored to an enterprise’s internal users and are particularly relevant for cloud-native architectures, separating supporting capabilities from application-specific logic.

Defining Cloud Native Platforms

The core of the discussion at the CNCF Platform Working Group is: “What exactly is a cloud-native platform, and why do organizations need one?” A cloud-native platform is a strategic business initiative that enables organizations to deliver value more efficiently and effectively. It is characterized by:

Vendor-neutrality: A cloud-native platform should be open and agnostic, allowing organizations to leverage various technologies and services without being locked into a single vendor. Scalability and flexibility: The platform should be designed to accommodate the organization’s growing and changing needs, with the ability to add or remove components as needed easily.
Developer-centricity: The platform should empower developers to be more productive by providing self-service capabilities, streamlined workflows, and a consistent developer experience.
Operational efficiency: The platform should simplify and automate the management and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure, allowing the organization to focus on delivering value to customers.
Continuous improvement: The platform should be designed with a mindset of continuous evolution, with regular updates and enhancements to address emerging needs and technologies.

By aligning with these principles, organizations can achieve faster time-to-market, improved developer productivity, and reduced operational overhead.

The Platform Maturity Model: Charting the Path to Success

Dominik Kress at the Berlin Pulumi Group meetup explaining the platform maturity model

The Platform Working Group has developed a Platform Maturity Model. This framework can help assess the current state of a cloud native platform and identify steps to enhance its maturity. It defines five levels:

Ad-hoc: At the lowest level, the platform is ad-hoc, with no dedicated team or budget and a reliance on individual efforts and workarounds.
Operational: The platform has a dedicated team and budget, which focus primarily on operational tasks and maintenance rather than strategic initiatives.
Scalable: The platform is now viewed as a product with a clear roadmap and a focus on delivering value to internal customers. The platform team has more autonomy and the ability to drive innovation.
Enabled: The platform has become a strategic asset, with a thriving ecosystem of contributors and consumers. The platform team is empowered to make decisions and drive the platform’s evolution.
Optimized: The platform is continuously optimized, focusing on measuring and improving key performance indicators. The platform is deeply integrated into the organization’s technology strategy and decision-making processes.

By using the CNCF’s Platform Maturity Model as a guide, organizations can assess their current level of platform maturity, identify areas for improvement, and develop a roadmap to reach a higher level of platform success. This model has proven to be a valuable tool for many organizations, helping them to align their platform initiatives with their broader business objectives.

Platforms as Products: Driving Success

One of the key initiatives currently underway within the Platform Working Group is the “Platforms as Products” research project. This effort aims to explore the parallels between traditional product management and the management of cloud-native platforms to identify best practices and patterns that can help organizations unlock their platforms’ full potential.

The core premise of the “Platforms as Products” initiative is that successful cloud-native platforms should be treated and managed like products rather than just technology projects. This means applying principles of product management, such as:

Defining a clear vision and roadmap: Establishing a long-term vision for the platform and a roadmap to get there, focusing on delivering value to internal customers.
Measuring and optimizing for key metrics: Identifying and tracking the right performance indicators to ensure the platform delivers the desired outcomes.
Fostering a thriving ecosystem: Encouraging and enabling a community of contributors and consumers to drive the platform’s evolution and adoption.
Continuously iterating and improving: Embracing a continuous improvement mindset, with regular updates and enhancements to the platform based on user feedback and emerging needs.

By adopting a product management approach to their cloud native platforms, organizations can better align their platform initiatives with their broader business goals and ensure that the platform delivers tangible value to the organization.

Conclusion

This article and Dominik Kress’s talk highlighted the importance of platform engineering in cloud-native computing. Key points included defining cloud-native platforms, assessing platform maturity, and managing platforms with product management principles.

If you’re interested in learning more about platform engineering and getting involved in CNCF’s initiatives, there are several ways to participate:

Register for the Platform Engineering workshop series course.
Join the bi-weekly CNCF Platform Working Group meetings every other Tuesday at 5 PM Berlin time (11 AM ET).
Learn how to build Developer Portals with Pulumi. You can get off the ground faster with organization templates, a new project wizard, or leveraging the backstage plugin.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the CNCF Platform Working Group?

Within the CNCF, the Platform Working Group is a collaborative effort focused on the critical topic of cloud native platforms. As a working group member, you can share insights and experiences from our discussions.

The Platform Working Group is part of the CNCF’s App Delivery Technical Advisory Group, which includes sustainability, runtime, observability, and security initiatives. The working group is open to anyone interested in contributing to the conversation around cloud native platforms, and its members come from diverse backgrounds, including product managers, engineers, and industry experts.

Who is Dominik Kress?

Dominik Kress is a product manager at Giant Swarm and a CNCF Platforms Working Group member.

He is on a mission to simplify developers’ lives by delivering intuitive developer platforms. He has been in the IT industry for over seven years, starting his journey as a Full Stack Software Engineer, falling in love with DevOps and Product Organisations to become a Product Manager for Cloud Technology later.

Dominik is passionate about Cloud Transformation, Product Management, and helping people. He loves contributing to the community with talks, articles, or publications.

How can I participate in the Platform As A Product research?

The “Platforms as Products” research project is currently underway, with the Platform Working Group conducting interviews and gathering insights from organizations that have successfully implemented cloud native platforms. The goal is to distill these learnings into a set of best practices and patterns that can be shared with the broader community.

To participate in this research, sign up here.

Platform Engineering & DevOps Series Kickoff Announcement

Sara Huddleston — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:38:46 +0000

We are excited to announce the kickoff of the Platform Engineering & DevOps Series, which will run from July 16 to October 31. This series will feature in-person events across various cities, including Berlin, London, Paris, Sydney, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Denver, and NYC. For those unable to attend an in-person event, we encourage you to participate in a virtual DevOps & Platform Engineering workshop.

Upcoming In-Person Events

Pulumi is hosting in-person meetups and virtual workshops for engineers interested in Platform Engineering and DevOps, covering topics from best practices to setup and implementation to advanced topics. Join us for tech talks, hands-on workshops, and opportunities to network with fellow engineers.

First Platform Engineering & DevOps in-person event: Berlin - July 16

Join Dominik Kress (Product Manager at Giant Swarm and member of the CNCF Platforms Working Group) and Guy Menahem (Solutions Architect at Komodor and community leader at The Platformers) at LOBE Block for an engaging discussion on platform engineering.

Dominik Kress will present “What the Heck is the CNCF Platform Working Group? Answers from a Member!”
Guy Menahem will present “For This Backstage, You Don’t Need a Special Pass: Platform Engineering in Practice.”

For more details and to RSVP, visit the Berlin Meetup page.

Second In-Person Event: Boston, July 24

Join Pulumi’s founder & CEO, Joe Duffy, and Jamie Baldanza, Director of DevOps at Relay Therapeutics, for the launch of our Boston meetup at The Foundry. This is a great opportunity for DevOps engineers, platform engineers, software engineers, and Cloud enthusiasts to connect and share insights.

RSVP is required due to limited capacity. Secure your spot, and RSVP at the Boston Meetup page.

More coming soon!

We expected Seattle, Paris, and London’s meetups to happen in early September. Details for the other in-person events will be coming soon, so stay tuned for more updates at Platform Engineering & DevOps Series.

No upcoming in-person events in your area? Attend one of our virtual workshops and keep up with the latest in DevOps & Platform Engineering!

Virtual Workshops

Getting Started with CI/CD for AWS using GitHub Actions: July 17. Learn more and register here.
From Zero to Production in Kubernetes: July 25. Learn more and register here.
Advanced CI/CD for AWS using Pulumi and GitHub Actions: August 14. Learn more and register here.
Mastering Platform Engineering: From Setup to Scaling Success: TBD.

Join us for tech talks, hands-on workshops, and opportunities to network with industry peers. We are excited to meet you in person or virtually. See you there!

Announcing PulumiUP Conference 2024

Sara Huddleston — Wed, 01 May 2024 17:27:25 +0000

Today we announce our annual PulumiUP virtual conference taking place on September 18, 2024. PulumiUP is our global cloud and IaC conference for anyone interested in infrastructure as code, cloud, AI, platform engineering, DevOps, and cloud culture. Every year, we strive to build a program packed with technical talks, demos, and best practices to empower you with new learnings and inspiration that you can apply in your professional life. Attend to hear from industry leaders, experts, and community peers.

What is PulumiUP?

PulumiUP isn’t just another conference, it’s a global gathering of minds passionate about cloud technologies, AI, DevOps, and everything in between. Whether you’re an industry veteran or just dipping your toes into the vast ocean of cloud computing, PulumiUP has something for everyone.

You’ll hear keynotes from Pulumi Founder/CEO Joe Duffy and CTO Luke Hoban, stories from industry leaders on their experiences with cloud adoption and transformation (and how they used Pulumi to make it happen), and talks from other members of the Pulumi community (like you!) aimed at helping you navigate the ever-changing world of the cloud.

Call for Speakers: Your Story Matters

One exciting addition to this year’s event is the call for speakers. We invite you, the community, to share your stories, experiences, and expertise with fellow attendees. Whether it’s a deep dive into a groundbreaking project, lessons learned from failures, or innovative best practices, your voice matters at PulumiUP.

Key Dates to Remember

CFP opens: Thursday, April 25, 2024.
CFP closes: Monday, June 17, 2024.
CFP Notifications: Monday, July 22, 2024.

Selection Criteria

At PulumiUP, diversity and originality are celebrated. We welcome proposals from all corners of the tech community and prioritize fresh perspectives and solutions. Regardless of where you are in the world, we want to hear from you. Whether you’re a seasoned speaker or a first-timer, we encourage you to submit your ideas. Just remember, no vendor pitches allowed!

Talk Formats and Themes

You can submit up to two proposals in either the Lightning Talk (15-minute) or traditional session (30-minute) formats. The conference will cover a wide array of themes, including:

Infrastructure as Code: From cloud providers to Kubernetes, explore the latest trends and best practices in cloud computing and IaC.
Platform Engineering & DevOps: Learn how to streamline CI/CD practices, automate infrastructure operations, build internal developer portals (IDP), and improve developer experiences.
AI / ML: Dive into the world of AI and ML with topics like deploying AI application, LLM models, MLOps, and AIOps.
Cloud Culture: Discover the human side of tech, focusing on diversity, inclusivity, and collaboration within the industry.

Do you have a story to tell? Submit your proposal.

Join Us on September 18!

Register for PulumiUP. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we gear up for PulumiUP 2024. We can’t wait to see you there!

How AI is Transforming DevOps: AI Talks for DevOps Insights

Sara Huddleston — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 22:05:34 +0000

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with DevOps signals a new era in software development. DevOps possesses unique characteristics and needs that make it exceptionally compatible with AI augmentation. Given that code fundamentally relies on language, and large language models (LLMs) serve as the core of GPT functionality, these models are particularly well-suited for tasks such as code generation. This article unwraps the topics addressed during our “AI: Friends or Foe | AI Talks for DevOps” event in San Francisco.

How will AI Impact the Future of DevOps

In the Fireside chat, Luke Hoban expressed his enthusiasm for incorporating AI into DevOps, emphasizing its potential utilization by both DevOps professionals and the development team. In contrast, Nana Janashia, TechWorld with Nana, adopted a more cautious stance, drawing attention to potential risks, particularly regarding reliability.

What is DevOps in AI

When considering the adoption of AI and AI engineering, such as prompt engineering and other specific disciplines, AI engineers rely heavily on the cloud. Many AI-based systems are built around cloud-native tools, practices, and managed services.

The extensive use of cloud-native primitives means that AI is fundamentally a cloud adoption story. Consequently, established DevOps and infrastructure as code tooling and best practices play an important role in AI engineering, in what is being done, and in leveraging its use.

What is AI in DevOps

Integrating AI in DevOps entails employing machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence technologies to automate and optimize various software development and delivery aspects, including tasks such as automating testing and deployment processes and refining resource management.

The incorporation of AI in DevOps can result in:

Enhanced speed
Improved resource management
Increased reliability throughout the software development lifecycle

Consequently, organizations may experience swifter deployments, reduced errors, and heightened overall productivity. By substituting manual processes with automation and AI-powered solutions, DevOps teams can elevate product quality and more efficiently oversee their systems.

How AI is Currently Used in DevOps

Luke Hoban at the San Francisco Pulumi Group meetup discussing the usage of AI, during the AI Talks for DevOps

DevOps significantly impacts all stages of the development and operations lifecycle. It has helped break silos and optimize to increase developer velocity and productivity, creating a positive impact on the ops side.

AI assists DevOps teams to refine their operations by detecting inefficiencies and triggering warnings as soon as issues appear. This technology also enables real-time observation of systems and applications, permitting prompt actions from operations personnel and minimizing downtime.

AI-driven automation can also help the software development process with code generation. The operations teams from both departments quickly pinpoint any issues in their workflows while speeding up decision-making processes.

In the long term, the AI may use cloud credentials to create and autonomously automate deployment and management and perform DevOps tasks on behalf of the DevOps or platform engineering team. In the near term, it is used to assist humans, from DevOps professionals to developers.

“In the near term, AI usage in DevOps is about how do you keep the human in the loop, how do you use it as a learning tool, as a code generation tool, and for auditing to provide actionable notifications, all of which are still very human-dependent. There is so much more it can be used for. Currently, it’s a tool serving humans. But it is fascinating to imagine it in the future when it can be trusted to be an autonomous agent.” - Luke Hoban, CTO of Pulumi and co-creator of TypeScript

So, how does this technology bring about these advancements? Two main ways are by streamlining development tasks and improving monitoring and security protocols.

Streamlining Development Workflows

AI has the potential to significantly change the software development life cycle by automating routine processes, using resources efficiently, and offering solutions for improved code. DevOps teams can leverage AI-driven tools to increase effectiveness when managing their assets while also improving code quality, leading to faster project deliveries.

For instance, AI can identify any slowdowns during progress and recommend improvements, analyze root causes, and help make judicious decisions regarding resource allocation, ultimately resulting in efficient delivery of software products.

Enhancing Monitoring and Security

The usage of AI significantly boosts DevOps monitoring and security. With the assistance of AI tools, operations teams can use machine learning algorithms to examine a massive amount of data to protect their applications from potential risks and enhance reliability. These algorithmic solutions provide valuable advice for development personnel, which helps strengthen protection measures while optimizing performance simultaneously.

How Can a DevOps Team Take Advantage of Artificial Intelligence

A DevOps team can leverage AI in several ways to enhance efficiency, automation, and overall productivity. Here are some key strategies for a DevOps team to leverage AI:

Code Generation and Learning

AI can be a powerful tool to make the development process much smoother. It can help engineers focus on what matters instead of searching for documentation on websites, developer forums, or search engines for answers to help solve specific problems. The perfect code snippet is often hard to find or may not even exist.

Generative AI, powered by LLMs, can help developers and DevOps engineers quickly discover, learn, and, for example, use new cloud infrastructure APIs.

Pulumi AI response to Run metabase in Azure, using TypeScript

You can see it in practice using Pulumi AI. You can use natural language to ask for a specific cloud infrastructure goal and obtain a corresponding Pulumi program in your preferred programming language. Moreover, Pulumi AI facilitates the iterative refinement of your cloud infrastructure, incorporating new features, enhancements to security and performance, resolution of correctness issues, and clarification of requirements. Try Pulumi Neo.

Intelligent Resource Management

Platform and developer teams are spinning up resources across many cloud accounts within multiple cloud providers. It can be almost impossible to aggregate and search your infrastructure across these accounts since every cloud and every account is (by design!) a walled garden.

Often, to answer key questions about their business, such as “Which team has the largest cloud footprint?”, teams need to combine data across various clouds, cloud accounts, and SaaS tools. This prevents organizations from getting quick answers to operational questions and barriers to building aggregations to derive insights. AI can provide actionable insights over infrastructure with natural language processing (NLP) queries.

“I can get developers using IaC immediately with Pulumi Deployments and its GitHub integration, while Pulumi Insights [Resource Search] makes it really easy to find idle developer environments that need to be shut down, which reduces our cloud costs” - Santosh Dornal, Head of Software Test & DevOps, Alkira.

When using Pulumi Cloud, you can leverage AI Assist. You can provide a plain English (Spanish, French, or Japanese) request to express queries where you might not know the exact syntax, type tokens, or package names. AI Assist makes it easier by providing answers to queries like:

show me all s3 buckets not tagged in production
show azure and azure native security groups
show all AWS VPCs

Remediation Tool: Continuous and Automatic Compliance

Defining and managing security rules, criteria, and conditions are key to enabling security at scale. Policy as Code, or Compliance as Code, has the ability to verify and spot problems before deploying the infrastructure. When policies are written with code, you can apply software development practices such as testing, automated deployment, and version control.

AI can be valuable not just in anomaly detection but also in remediation, which doesn’t just warn or error but can change the infrastructure directly to remediate compliance gaps. With Pulumi, Remediation policies can be configured and applied across any subset of stacks within an organization.

Consider the unfortunate incident at GitLab, marked by a disastrous sequence of events resulting in the loss of segments of production databases and substantial user data.

In this scenario, AI could have swiftly pinpointed the root cause and proposed a rapid solution, potentially mitigating the extent of damage before it escalated.

While the benefits of writing policies as code are evident for DevOps engineers, the organizational benefits are even more significant.

Enhance Collaboration and Communication

Nowadays, many professionals with DevOps in their titles are held accountable for the multiple aspects of Dev + Ops. At its core, DevOps is a cultural movement that removes barriers among teams and promotes collaboration and shared responsibility between dev and ops.

DevOps teams have seen great benefits from AI-driven tools, particularly in improving transparency, encouraging feedback, providing quick answers to common queries, and automating routine tasks. Many major companies, like Microsoft, use AI to build efficient workflows that make better decisions, leading to increased business outcomes. This includes smoother application delivery, a prime function of DevOps initiatives.

Improved Product Delivery

Companies incorporating AI into their DevOps strategy reap the rewards of accelerated product delivery. This has been made possible through improved workflows, automated testing, and strengthened security measures, leading to greater efficiency in software development by allowing development and operations teams more scope for dealing with complex tasks using machine learning models. They can make better decisions, resulting in faster product delivery and enhanced business outcomes.

By streamlining existing systems within this context, customers can benefit from superior products delivered faster than before while companies provide and reinforce their business value.

Planning and Cost Optimization

Implementing AI algorithms or AI tools that analyze usage patterns can assist in predicting future resource needs and optimize cloud infrastructure costs. This also ties in with intelligent resource management mentioned before, which can enhance cost efficiency, optimize resource allocation, and prevent unnecessary expenses.

Top 5 Skills for DevOps Engineers in the AI Era

Adora Nwodo with Nana discussing skills that DevOps engineers will need to learn to make AI work

DevOps engineers must open new skills, mainly in cloud services, data, and AI/ML.

Programming Languages: Although DevOps don’t usually need to know general programming languages in-depth, they should know what is most used by application teams. It’s a nice-to-have to find errors in CI/CD pipelines and fix them themselves as needed, but it is a must-have if the goal is to work MLOps.
Infrastructure as Code: Automation is important for DevOps and critical for MLOps. IaC, using familiar languages, has been used since the early days of MLOps and is a key component to solving the cloud orchestration challenge present in AI/ML. Dive into more detail in The Real AI Challenge is Cloud, not Code!
Continuous Integration and Delivery: CI/CD is mandatory knowledge, and it must be understood in detail to predict data preparation code, AI/ML code, CI/CD code, and infrastructure-related code.
Custom containers: As a DevOps professional, you are expected to understand Docker and/or Kubernetes concepts and best practices.
Orchestration: This is the holy grail of Ops and your key to unlocking AI.

How to Overcome AI for DevOps Challenges

The integration of AI in DevOps brings forth several challenges that organizations must navigate to leverage the full potential of these technologies. Here are some key challenges and potential strategies to overcome them:

1. Skills and Expertise

Challenge: AI & ML expertise is often scarce within DevOps teams, leading to a skill gap in implementing and managing AI-driven tools.

Overcoming Strategy: Organizations will need to hire professionals with AI and ML expertise, or existing team members will need training in machine learning, becoming proficient in MLOps combined to DevOps principles. Collaboration between DevOps and data science teams can also bridge the knowledge gap.

2. Integration Complexity

Challenge: Integrating AI seamlessly into existing DevOps workflows can be complex, given the diverse technologies and processes involved.

Overcoming Strategy: Prioritize a phased integration approach, gradually introducing AI capabilities into specific stages of the DevOps pipeline. This allows teams to adapt without disrupting established processes.

3. Scalability

Challenge: As AI applications within DevOps expand, ensuring scalability becomes crucial to accommodate growing workloads.

Overcoming Strategy: Design AI solutions with scalability in mind, utilizing cloud resources and containerization. Regularly assess performance and adjust infrastructure to meet evolving demands.

4. Data Quality and Availability

Challenge: AI models rely heavily on high-quality and readily available data. Inconsistent or inadequate data can lead to inaccurate predictions or suboptimal performance.

Overcoming Strategy: Prioritize data quality and establish robust data pipelines. Conduct regular audits to ensure data accuracy and implement strategies for handling missing or incomplete data.

5. Cultural Resistance

Challenge: Resistance to change or skepticism about the benefits of AI within DevOps and in software development can impede successful integration.

Overcoming Strategy: Foster a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. Provide clear communication about the benefits of AI, involve team members in the decision-making process, and showcase success stories to build confidence.

Navigating these challenges requires a thoughtful and strategic approach, focusing on collaboration, skill development, and the gradual incorporation of AI into existing DevOps practices. Regular evaluation and adaptation are essential to ensure a successful and sustainable integration of AI in the DevOps environment.

Conclusion

AI in DevOps can transform software development by making workflows more efficient, monitoring and security stronger, and overall effectiveness increased. Organizations that embrace AI/ML aim for better collaboration between teams, automating and intelligently managing infrastructure, reducing time-to-market, and increasing developer productivity and cost savings due to streamlining processes within their development lifecycle. AI and ML knowledge will become necessary skills expected to be applied to enhance and benefit the development, security, and operation teams as a whole. Follow the Pulumi Python + AI/ML series to upskill and get ahead:

Frequently Asked Questions

Can AI replace DevOps?

DevOps has not been taken over by AI yet. Rather, its use has made a difference in code quality and accelerated certain processes. Improvements to the quality of coding have been seen as one of the main benefits brought on through integration with artificial intelligence.

What is an example of AI in DevOps?

AI can be utilized to make DevOps processes more efficient by creating test cases and pipelines, assessing infrastructure configurations for security concerns, and deploying applications. This technology includes machine learning algorithms, natural language processing systems, computer vision capabilities, chatbot programs, and virtual assistants. All are designed with one goal in mind – optimization of operations within development teams.

What is the future of DevOps?

Operations teams collaborating with developers to create quality products quickly and effectively is the goal for DevOps moving forward. The vision of this process involves both sides working together, resulting in an improved system and increased efficiency.

LangChain for DevOps: Learn LLM & GenAI for Dev, Sec & Ops

Sara Huddleston — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The emergence of DevOps revolutionized software development. Now, with AI powered tools like LangChain, these transformations are being accelerated. Unsurprisingly, our distinguished speaker at the launch of Pulumi’s in-person AI Talks, Patrick Debois, who coined the term “DevOps,” has recently tuned into LLM and GenAI Ops using the Langchain framework.

This article unwraps the topics addressed during our “Generative AI, Apps, and DevOps | AI/ML Talks” event in Seattle, focusing on Langchain and GenAI for DevOps. You’ll be able to watch Patrick Debois teach LangChain to learn LLMs and GenAI, with code examples and lessons that are easily understood by traditional software engineering.

What is LangChain used for?

LangChain is an open-source Python framework designed to empower developers to construct robust generative AI applications. It facilitates the integration of advanced AI models such as OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s LLaMA. This versatile tool finds application in developing retrieval-augmented chatbots and other personalized assistants, utilizing technologies like ChatGPT. Furthermore, it enables tasks such as question-answering (GQA), summarization, code comprehension, API interactions, data cleansing, and much more.

Why is LangChain becoming popular?

The landscape of AI development is rapidly evolving, and LangChain is packed with incredible features for building LLM applications and tools. Developers with a wide range of expertise use LangChain for tasks such as managing interactions with language models, establishing seamless connections between diverse components, and integrating external resources like APIs and databases effortlessly.

The LangChain platform hosts a diverse collection of APIs seamlessly integrated into applications. This enables developers to incorporate advanced language processing functionalities without the need for laborious construction from scratch.

LangChain Accelerating DevOps

Patrick Debois presenting the workshop Dev, Sec & Ops meet LangChain

LangChain can streamline the integration of large language models and data sources. By helping bring in AI capabilities, DevOps can revolutionize software development life cycles by making it easier for teams to handle challenges while optimizing resource allocation and usage through their cutting-edge, AI-powered solutions. This makes the automation of manual processes easier and the development of new resources far more accessible with faster utilization rates by leveraging artificial intelligence. Significantly important as “Developer Velocity and Productivity” become business performance metrics across various industries.

The features included in LangChain include chain interface memory functions for scalability within apps, control over dataflow, as storage – making code quality more reliable, plus seamless machine learning models integration, which allows them to build custom automated AI programs quickly. Thus providing users with an advanced but easy way of creating sophisticated solutions by combining their knowledge of coding and machine training models together.

How to Use LangChain to Learn LLMs and GenAI for Dev(Sec)Ops

Patrick teaches in the way he would like to be taught. The workshop mainly uses the Langchain framework and basic Python knowledge. OpenAI will also need to be installed. You’ll learn essential skills in multiple use cases, applying Langchain for LLM application Development.

You can see the breakdown of the lessons per role below, and find the code examples in the Learning LLMs and GenAI for DevSecOps repo.

Developer

Calling a simple LLM using OpenAI
Looking at debugging in Langchain
Chatting with OpenAI as a model
Using prompt templates
Use Docloader to read your local files and prepare them for the LLM
Explain the calculation and use of embeddings
Understand how splitting and chunking are important
Loading embeddings and documents in a vector database
Use a chain for Questions and Answers to implement the RAG pattern (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
Show the use of OpenAI documentation to have the llm generate calls to find real-time information
Implement an Agent and provide it with tools to get more real-time information

Operations

Find out how many tokens you are using and the cost
How to cache your calls to an LLM using exact matching or embeddings
How to cache the calculation of embeddings and run the calculation locally
Run your own local LLM (using Ollama)
Track your calls and log them to a file (using a callback handler)
Impose output structure (as JSON) and have the LLM retry if it’s not correct

Security

Explain the OWASP top 10 for LLMS
Show how simple prompt injection works and some mitigation strategies
How to detect prompt injection using a 3rd party model from Hugging Face
Detect project injection by using a prompt
Check the answer LLMs provide and reflect if it is ok
Use a Hugging Face model to detect if an LLM output was toxic
Show a simple prompt for asking the LLM’s opinion on Kubernetes and Trivy vulnerabilities

Real-World Applications of LangChain AI in DevOps

Vector similarity search in a RAG application. Credit to LangChain and Neo4J team

LangChain AI has practical applications in DevOps, particularly related to question-answering using documents as context, extraction, evaluation, and natural language processing tasks, all powered by AI tools. An interesting scenario is implementing a knowledge graph based RAG application with LangChain to support the DevOps team.

ChatGPT based on LLMs enabled with these AI tools is one of the foremost implementations at present. Tracking capabilities through LangChain enables developers to determine which prompts are more effective, thus supporting what artificial intelligence offers when integrated into development operations.

Monitoring and Anomaly Detection with LangChain AI

Monitoring LLM performance with LangChain and LangKit. Credit to WhyLabs

LangChain AI provides an efficient approach to DevOps through continuous monitoring, and anomaly detection. LangChain’s integration in DevOps allows for intelligent monitoring of various system parameters, application performance metrics, and log files. It can process large volumes of data generated by applications and infrastructure components. Through natural language processing (NLP) techniques, LangChain can interpret logs, error messages, and system alerts in real-time.

LangChain’s AI-driven anomaly detection capabilities are pivotal in identifying deviations from expected behavior in the monitored data. By analyzing historical data patterns, LangChain can learn the normal behavior of the system and its components. When the system encounters an unusual event or behavior, LangChain can promptly detect it as an anomaly. These anomalies could be security threats, performance bottlenecks, code quality, or any irregularities within the system.

Keep in mind that monitoring LLM performance is important to ensure you can rely on the model’s accuracy and relevance in real-world applications. Our customer WhyLabs has a great article showing the significance of monitoring LLMs performance with LangChain and how to get started with monitoring.

Future: AI, Apps, and DevOps

Platform engineering, DevOps, or MLOps may be the next steps in the AI-driven software development future. AI tools are the gateway to giving developers access to big language models that allow them to create highly sophisticated solutions.

Accelerating Development with AI-Powered Tools

AI-powered tools are revolutionizing the development process, enabling DevOps teams to access intelligent recommendations and improve code quality or obtain suggestions on new ways to accomplish goals. An example is the usage of Pulumi Neo.

Tools like LangChain, Amazon CodeGuru, and Pulumi AI provide actionable insights for efficient resource utilization while enforcing policy and compliance best practices. An IaC that leverages AI empowers teams to automate and more effectively manage infrastructure.

Developers can reap multiple benefits from higher quality assessment of code lines, instantaneous detection of policy and security issues, useful cues on how to resolve problems, and improving code quality, productivity, and time management.

AI has greatly impacted optimization during the review stage, providing developers with better insights into performance issues, code effectiveness, and resource utilization without any extra effort.

Security and Vulnerability Management with AI

The marriage of AI, machine learning, and DevOps/DevSecOps practices revolutionizes security and vulnerability management in software engineering. AI-enabled tools technologies not only strengthen the defenses of software systems but also enable organizations to stay one step ahead in ensuring successful deployments by removing manual processes through automation, using single sources of truth, enforcing least-privileged access through role-based access controls, and automated remediation to correct configuration violations like auto-tagging, removing Internet access, and enabling storage encryption.

DevSecOps can foster collaboration between developers, security, and operations and still enhance security and compliance best practices using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning techniques.

Leveraging Machine Learning in DevOps

Applying Machine Learning in DevOps is a game-changer. Not only does it automate and enhance various processes but also brings an intelligent, predictive, and adaptive dimension to development workflows. By embracing these technologies, development teams can achieve higher efficiency, improve code quality, optimize performance, and seamlessly integrate with artificial intelligence, thereby shaping the future of software engineering.

ML models can evaluate past outcomes from compilation/builds plus performance metrics within an operation so that developers may leverage these insights when writing code accordingly with machine learning algorithms, allowing them to identify vulnerabilities or issues faster through root cause analysis while ameliorating system security against outside attacks like hackers or DDOS activity thus boosting overall system productivity thanks to AI implementation into existing processes.

Implementing AI models into DevOps: Key Considerations

When considering AI, it’s essential to assess data quality, integration complexity, cost savings, and ethical/legal considerations:

Ensuring the data used for training these AI tools are precise, exhaustive, and up-to-date will help gain more reliable results.
An important aspect of the implementation process is integrating existing DevOps instruments and guaranteeing scalability, depending on the company’s necessities.
Ensuring that all laws applicable when working with such technology.

Conclusion

AI and ML are rapidly becoming a necessity, which can greatly enhance and benefit Development, Security, and Operation teams. At first glance, it may appear daunting or out of reach, but tools like Langchain and Pulumi can make it easier to get started. Follow the Pulumi Python + AI/ML series to upskill and get ahead:

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Patrick Debois?

Patrick Debois is a highly accomplished technologist whose expertise spans the domains of Development (Dev), Security (Sec), and Operations (Ops). Acknowledged as a respected confidant within the developer, security, and operations communities, Patrick is presently deeply engrossed in the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, continually pushing the boundaries of his technical acumen.

He was the organizer of the inaugural DevOpsDays in 2009. He is credited with coining “DevOps” and co-authoring the renowned DevOps Handbook. In the past, Patrick has collaborated with esteemed technology organizations such as Atlassian and Snyk. Currently, he wears dual hats as the Vice President of Engineering and a Distinguished Engineer at Showpad.

Is LangChain Free?

Yes, LangChain is an open-source framework, free to use and modify.

How Does LangChain Work?

LangChain is a meticulously designed open-source framework tailored to simplify the creation of applications powered by large language models (LLMs). First, you will need to have a language model or you can use a public language model or train your own.

Once you have a language model ready, you can start building applications. The framework offers an array of tools and APIs, simplifying the process of connecting language models to diverse data sources, interacting with their environment, and constructing intricate applications.

LangChain operates by linking together various components, referred to as links, to establish a workflow. Each link in the chain performs a task and is connected in a sequence, enabling the output of one link to serve as the input for the subsequent one. This sequential linking allows the chain to execute intricate tasks by combining simple tasks seamlessly.

See LangChain’s get started docs for more information.

Does ChatGPT use LangChain?

ChatGPT utilizes LangChain to create custom artificial intelligence (AI). This allows for an individualized experience.

How Starburst Data Creates Infrastructure Automation Magic With Code

George Huang — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post summarizes a presentation by Matt Stephenson at PulumiUP 2023.

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.

Watch Matt Stephenson’s full presentation with demos. 8:03 demo of CI/CD. 15:33 demo of infrastructure automation.

Technical and Business Problems to Solve

Starburst operates a managed Trino service that runs on Kubernetes clusters on multiple clouds. Their Kubernetes clusters needed frequent manual scaling based on workloads. Furthermore, upgrading Trino versions running on the clusters ran the risk of potential service disruptions for customers. The company had been using tools like Terraform for IaC, Argo CD for deploying Helm charts, Maven, Docker containers, and a Slack bot for infrastructure and deployments. Their CI/CD workflow was difficult to maintain because they needed to create wrappers for their previous IaC tooling, making it less approachable in CI/CD environments. The pipeline was tenuously bound together using GitHub Actions and a Slack bot, requiring specialized GHA runners, leading to a messy architecture.

Why Starburst Chose Pulumi

Recognizing opportunities for improvement, Matt brought in Pulumi and its Automation API. This unified Starburst’s software development and infrastructure management practices, especially when deploying and managing Trino clusters on Kubernetes. The top two reasons Matt chose Pulumi were:

Support for programming languages: Pulumi supports the main languages used by Starburst’s developers, Java and TypeScript. This enables all engineers to write infrastructure code and promotes a cohesive application and infrastructure codebase.
Pulumi Automation API: Automation API is a programmatic interface for the Pulumi CLI and Pulumi IaC engine, which enables Starburst engineers to build infrastructure automation into their applications and CI/CD processes, and orchestrate complex provisioning workflows.

Benefits of Using Pulumi

Adopting Pulumi and its Automation API provided several benefits that made Starburst’s engineers more efficient and productive, ultimately leading to faster and more reliable releases for Starburst’s customers. Matt summed up the benefits of Pulumi for Starburst’s engineers: “When I think about building an airplane, I think about precision and having the right tools for the job.” Pulumi, for Starburst, epitomized this precision and efficiency.

Increased deployment speeds by 3x for new customer releases: Starburst engineers used the Pulumi Automation API to triple the deployment speed of multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters with blue-green deployments that complete within minutes. They did this by orchestrating blue-green updates across their data plane running on the clusters, ensuring zero customer downtime. They built intricate integrations between Pulumi and internal APIs that enabled them to seamlessly transition customers to new clusters. Now they can update their customers’ runtimes, including VPCs and Kubernetes clusters, twice a week.

Unified cluster and infrastructure management: Rather than juggling multiple tools for managing Kubernetes and infrastructure, Starburst engineers use a single tool to manage over 50 Kubernetes clusters and deploy Helm charts into the clusters, spanning multiple regions. They also use Pulumi to manage SaaS platforms like Cloudflare, Confluent, and DataDog.

Consistent deployment lifecycles: Using Pulumi’s integration with GitHub Actions, Starburst engineers built a streamlined CI/CD process where infrastructure and application code builds within the same pipelines with automated test environments. They accomplished this using Pulumi Automation API to abstract the underlying runtime environments, circumventing the need for additional layers and wrappers.

Try Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code Automation

Sign up for a free account to try deploying infrastructure on any cloud with Pulumi Deployments, or register for an upcoming workshop to learn more about how Pulumi can help you ship cloud infrastructure faster and more safely.

Go to more case studies →

Announcing the Speaker Lineup for PulumiUP 2023

George Huang — Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

PulumiUP is our virtual user conference for the Pulumi community and anyone interested in Infrastructure as Code. Every year, we strive to build a program packed with technical talks, demos, and best practices with the goal of leaving you with new learnings and inspiration that will help you become a better cloud engineer. You’ll hear from industry leaders and experts about IaC, software engineering, DevOps, Platform engineering, and AI.

We hope you’ll join us virtually and take this opportunity to grow your knowledge and become infrastructure as code stars.

Get Ready for Amazing Launches and Demos

Learn about Pulumi’s newest features across the core IaC SDKs and Pulumi Cloud. And watch hands-on demos by the Pulumi team:

Joe Duffy, Co-founder and CEO
Luke Hoban, Co-creator of TypeScript and CTO
Meagan Cojocar, Principal Product Manager
Evan Boyle, Engineering Manager
Zaid Ajaj, Software Engineer

Final Speakers Announced

You’ll hear from innovators, leaders, and experts from multiple industries and learn about infrastructure as code, software engineering, and cloud engineering.

Sam Cogan - Solution Architect, WTW

Talk: Keeping your Infrastructure Code DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
Sam is a Solution Architect with WTW and a Microsoft Azure MVP. Sam is focused on delivering applications into the cloud using IaaS, PaaS, Serverless, Containers, and Kubernetes. Sam is particularly focused on automation and DevOps, including Infrastructure as Code, Cloud automation tooling, PowerShell, and CI/CD tooling.

Dennis Sauvé - DevOps Engineer, Washington Trust Bank

Talk: How a Bank Modernized its Software Engineering with Infrastructure as Code Automation
Dennis is a development operations engineer at Washington Trust Bank in Spokane, WA. With years of experience in software development and cloud engineering, he works to streamline deployment pipelines and create solutions for developers.

Ala Shiban - Co-Founder & CEO, Klotho

Talk: Creating a ‘Cloud-Aware’ Code Solution
Ala is the co-founder of Klotho, a startup that transforms plain code to cloud-native code. He started his journey on Commodore64 with cassette tapes and (much) more recently worked on distributed systems, developer tools, and large-scale web, cloud, and microservice backends.

He’s led smaller teams and larger organizations at Microsoft’s Developer Division and Riot Games’ Infrastructure Platform organization.

Matt Stephenson - Sr. Principal Software Engineer, Starburst Data

Talk: Creating Infrastructure Automation Magic with Code
Matt is a Sr. Principal Software Engineer at Starburst Data. He’s responsible for Starburst’s infrastructure architecture. He’s worked at many tech companies, including Square, Oracle, Google, and Amazon. Aside from technology, Matt is a pilot and helps build The Man for Burning Man each year.

Tim Holm - Co-Founder & CTO, Nitric

Talk: Engineering a Multi-cloud Platform
Tim Holm is the Co-founder and CTO at Nitric, with 12 years of experience in software engineering and cloud development. In disciplines ranging from Server and Storage Virtualisation and Automation, Mobile Application development, Full-stack application development, and Cloud infrastructure automation. Before founding Nitric, Tim worked to deliver critical infrastructure projects in Government and Fintech.

In his spare time, Tim enjoys video games, building Lego, and mountain biking.

Tyler Scheuble - Head of Platform, People Data Labs

Talk: Using Monorepos to Level-up your Infrastructure as Code and Software Delivery
Tyler possesses a genuine enthusiasm for technology. At People Data Labs, he has designed petabyte-scale data pipelines and high-performance APIs with demanding availability requirements, which informed his approach to leading the development of the next generation of the startup’s development pipelines and environments.

Tyler is passionate about finding simple solutions to cross-cutting concerns such as security, observability, and development velocity.

Sefi Genis - Co-Founder & CTO, Firefly

Talk: Lessons Learned from Writing Thousands of Lines of IaC
Sefi is the CTO and Co-Founder at Firefly. He started his career in the 8200 Unit of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and then continued on to security and developer tooling companies.

Sefi was a founding engineer at Dome9 Security (later acquired by Checkpoint), where he led the Backend Infrastructure of the product post-acquisition. Before founding Firefly, he became Head of Engineering in an Israeli cybersecurity startup company. Today he is building Firefly to help engineers manage the new reality of cloud-native operations.

Panel Discussion - AI and the Future of Cloud Development

Prepare yourself for the future of cloud development! Gain valuable insights from industry experts in our panel discussion, where we explore the transformative impact of AI on the cloud infrastructure and software engineering industries. The panel discussion will be moderated by CEO Joe Duffy. These are the panelists:

Amanda Silver - CVP Developer Tools, Microsoft

Amanda is the CVP of PM for Microsoft’s Developer Division, including the Visual Studio family of products, .NET, TypeScript, and our developer platforms. She has been key to Microsoft’s transformation to contribute to open source with the introduction of TypeScript, Visual Studio Code, and the acquisition of both Xamarin and GitHub. She believes that a tight digital feedback loop with zero distance between end-users and engineering teams is a critical element of great product development.

Beyang Liu - Co-Founder & CTO, Sourcegraph

Beyang is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph. Prior to Sourcegraph, Beyang was a software engineer at Palantir Technologies, where he developed new data analysis software on a small, customer-facing team working with Fortune 500 companies. Beyang studied Computer Science at Stanford, where he published research in probabilistic graphical models and computer vision at the Stanford AI Lab and thoroughly enjoyed his compilers course.

Luke Hoban - TypeScript Co-Creator and CTO, Pulumi

Luke is CTO at Pulumi. He has worked on developer tools his entire career. He started out on Visual Studio, C#, and .NET in the early 2000s, later joined the ECMAScript standards body as a representative of Microsoft and then became one of the co-founders of the TypeScript programming language.

Featured Partners

Thank you to our amazing partners for supporting PulumiUP! Visit these booths for tech talks, demos and Q&A about your favorite cloud platforms and developer tools:

AWS - Solutions Architects will be on hand to demo the latest AWS and Pulumi capabilities and help you get the most from the AWS platform.
Google Cloud - Customer Engineers will help you accelerate your cloud journey with helpful tips and Q&A.
Microsoft - Cloud Advocates will be available to show you how to kickstart your projects on Azure.
Equinix - Stop by the Equinix booth to learn all about the new Equinix Pulumi provider.
CircleCI - Stop by the CircleCI booth to learn best practices for adopting CI/CD in your organization.
New Relic - The New Relic team will demonstrate how to get started with Observability as Code with Pulumi and New Relic.
Firefly - If you have existing cloud resources you can convert them to Pulumi code easily with Firefly. Stop by the Firefly booth for a demo.
Nitric - The Nitric team will be on site to show you how to create cloud-agnostic infrastructure code from your application code.
Klotho - The Klotho team will show you how devops teams an application teams can easily collaborate to moderize and scale infrastructure without disruptions.
Port - Join the Port team to learn how to setup a self-service portal for your developers.

Want to attend PulumiUP 2023? Register now!

Join a Pulumi User Group (PUG) Meetup!

Sara Huddleston — Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi everyone,

After several great years on Meetup, the Pulumi Community is moving to a new home: Luma.

This wasn’t an easy decision. Together we’ve built 38 Pulumi User Groups across 14 countries, with nearly 10,000 members between them. Meetup is where that community took shape, and we’re grateful for everything that happened there.

We want to make it as easy as possible for you to show up. All upcoming events and workshops will be published on Luma going forward.

We have a global community made up of people from many different countries, but we also have many local communities. We want to enable our users to meet, share knowledge and ideas, answer questions, and learn about Pulumi and best practices. For that reason, we created the Pulumi User Groups, aka PUGs on Meetup.

Members of PUGs will have access to a global network of experts who can offer help, advice, and support on using Pulumi effectively. The PUGs will also feature regular in-person meetups, webinars, in-person and virtual workshops, and other events to help members stay up-to-date with the latest cloud infrastructure and Pulumi developments.

23 Pulumi User Groups (PUGs) Meetups in 10 countries

PUGs are led by Pulumi employees and Puluminaries, who are passionate community members that are experts in topics related to cloud infrastructure, Pulumi Cloud, cloud-native software development, and much more, and are willing to share their knowledge with the community.

United States Pulumi User Groups

South America Pulumi User Groups

São Paulo Pulumi User Group

European Pulumi User Groups

Middle East Pulumi User Groups

Tel Aviv Pulumi User Group

Asia Pulumi User Groups

Singapore Pulumi User Group

Oceania Pulumi User Groups

The First PUG in person

Our very first in-person PUG meetup took place in London, UK. The event was well-attended by developers, cloud architects, and other infrastructure enthusiasts. The attendees had the opportunity to network with other like-minded professionals and learn more about Pulumi’s tools and features from expert speakers.

During the meetup, attendees heard from several speakers, including Joe Duffy, Co-Founder & CEO at Pulumi, who was there to speak about Infrastructure as Code that writes itself after the release of Pulumi Insights, which happened that same day.

Other speakers included Liam Hampton, Sr. Regional Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, who spoke about Microsoft Azure and IaC, and Sam Cogan, Director of Solution Architecture at Willis Towers Watson, who spoke about building a library of reusable modules you can repeatedly reuse in your IaC projects.

Overall, the first PUG meetup was a huge success, and attendees left feeling inspired and energized about Pulumi’s tools and the community’s possibilities. With the launch of PUGs, Pulumi is demonstrating its commitment to building a strong and supportive community of professionals passionate about cloud infrastructure.

More PUGs and events to come

We are planning more in-person PUG events for the months to come. With PUGs, you’ll have the opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals, share knowledge and best practices, and stay up-to-date with the latest developments in cloud infrastructure and Pulumi.

Join the Pulumi User Groups in your local area, or if there isn’t one yet, you are welcome to join the Pulumi Slack community and meet people from all over the world.

Teaming up to help deliver more meals to Ukraine

Wendy Smith — Mon, 16 May 2022 09:00:54 +0200

Why not do good while learning about cloud native tech? Buoyant, Civo, Cockroach Labs, Fairwinds, Pulumi, and Jetstack have teamed up to donate $2 for each virtual booth visitor to World Central Kitchen (WCK), a non-profit committed to providing meals in response to humanitarian crises.

Working with restaurants across Ukraine and in six countries welcoming refugees, WCK is providing hundreds of thousands of daily meals for people in need. WCK serves meals at shelters, hospitals, transit hubs, and more. It’s a wonderful mission and, if you agree, we encourage you to donate to WCK directly 💙 🇺🇦 💛

How it works

Participating is easy. If you registered for KubeCon, just click on the booth links below to visit our virtual booths. Each visit will count as a $2 donation, so if you visit us all, that’s $12 for the cause right there!

Of course, there are many more reasons to visit our booths. You’ll find lots of great cloud native resources including demos, tutorials, ebooks, and more. Here are some of the highlights you can expect at each booth.

Pulumi — Universal Infrastructure as Code

At the Pulumi booth, you’ll learn about our cloud engineering platform, which brings infrastructure, developer, and security teams together through a unified software engineering process that tames cloud complexity and accelerates innovation. Don’t miss our Ask an Expert live sessions to hear directly from the engineering team. Whether you want to know more about how to build with Universal Infrastructure as Code in general-purpose programming and markup languages or just learn more about what’s on the roadmap, this is your chance to ask us anything.

Buoyant — the creator of Linkerd

Buoyant is announcing something really exciting: the introduction of fully managed Linkerd. You can be one of the first to check out the demo, and you’ll also find a ton of service mesh content including a service mesh 101 in English and Spanish, their Engineer’s Guide to mTLS, and details on Buoyant’s Service Mesh Academy.

Civo — Fast Simple, Managed Kubernetes

Stop by the Civo booth for live sessions on how to get the most out of your Kubernetes environment - including demos, Civo marketplace walkthroughs and an inside look at how they live-provision a private region. You’ll find lots of resources and friendly team members to answer any questions on Civo’s easy-to-use managed Kubernetes service. It is fully CNCF certified and 100% Kubernetes upstream compatible.

Cockroach Labs — Build What you Dream

CockroachDB’s presence this year at KubeCon (both physical and virtual) is primarily a charitable one (if you attend in person, visit booth P16, where for each badge scanned they’ll donate $3 to either Black Girls Code, Women Who Code, the Cancer Research Institute, or UNICEF for Ukrainian relief). Visit their booth to see demos and architecture overviews that relate what they’ve learned from building a multi-region, managed distributed SQL database offering on Kubernetes.

Fairwinds — Kubernetes Governance and Security

Fairwinds, a leader in Kubernetes governance providing a unified view between dev, sec, and ops, offers lots of great resources at their virtual booth this KubeCon. You can get a quick tour of Fairwinds Insights, learn about Kubernetes cost savings, how to make Kubernetes service ownership possible, typical Kubernetes security mistakes and much more. Come chat with a friendly Fairwinds engineer to talk about the many great open source solutions including Polaris, Goldilocks, Nova, and Pluto. Visit the Fairwinds booth today!

Jetstack — the creator of cert-manager

Get more out of cert-manager and find out how Jetstack Secure can eliminate workload misconfigurations and provide full visibility of each certificate across every production cluster. Chat directly to one of the project maintainers and learn to use cert-manager to secure Ingress endpoints and internal workloads using mTLS.

Lots of great reasons to visit our booths

There are plenty of good reasons to check out the great content of these amazing companies while supporting a wonderful charity that is doing an incredible job at helping the people of Ukraine.

Announcing PulumiUP 2022: The Cloud Awakens on May 4th

George Huang — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Calling all cloud engineers! Today we announce the second annual PulumiUP virtual conference taking place on May 4, 2022. We will also host the inaugural Pulumi Community Summit on May 5 to virtually assemble the world’s cloud, infrastructure, and Pulumi practitioners of all experience levels (hint: that’s you—all are welcome)! Register for both events here.

We’ve worked hard to curate a half-day of learning and expert insights from the people that are forming the best practices of the modern cloud and cloud native infrastructure era. On May 4, join us for four hours of exciting Pulumi product news and demos, technical talks, case studies of modern cloud innovators, and conversations on cloud topics that you won’t hear anywhere else. Hear from Pulumi’s CEO and CTO, pioneering engineers and engineering leaders from different industries, and Pulumi’s engineers. We are also introducing two tracks designed for Practitioners and Engineering Leaders.

Who’s speaking at PulumiUP 2022?

Aaron Friel, Staff Software Engineer, Pulumi
Elad Ben-Israel, Principal Software Development Engineer, Amazon Web Services
Joe Duffy, CEO & Founder, Pulumi
Justin Fitzhugh, VP of Cloud Engineering, Snowflake
Kat Cosgrove, Staff Developer Advocate, Pulumi
Luke Hoban, CTO, Pulumi
Meagan Cojocar, Senior Product Manager, Pulumi
Tomas Jansson, Software Architect, Elkjøp Nordic AS

In the coming weeks, we will be announcing even more speakers. Stay tuned!

What’s in store at PulumiUP 2022?

Stay tuned as we will announce the full agenda and speakers soon on our website and in an email to registrants. Here’s what you can expect at this year’s event:

Keynotes: Hear from Pulumi leaders Joe Duffy (Founder & CEO) and Luke Hoban (CTO) as they share new product announcements, demos, and thoughts on trends in the modern cloud.

Technical Talks: Dive deep with Pulumi’s engineers and guest speakers from the industry to learn best practices for infrastructure as code with popular programming languages and see demos.

Case Studies: Learn from engineers and leaders about how they have accelerated development velocity and increased reliability for their modern cloud applications with Pulumi.

Expert Conversations: Listen in on lively debates and discussions about the intersection of software development and cloud infrastructure from panels made up of industry leaders and practitioners.

Two Tracks: Choose from two session tracks that are designed for Practitioners and Engineering Leaders, in addition to the keynote and main stage presentations.

Inaugural Community Summit: Connect and engage with Pulumi practitioners from around the world—from the comfort of your home. We are hosting a Community Summit on May 5 featuring lightning talks and discussions.

Workshops: Get hands-on with Pulumi and cloud engineering in 1-hour workshops that will cover the fundamentals of Infrastructure as Code as well as more advanced subjects for experienced Pulumi users.

Join us on May 4 and 5

Register for PulumiUP and the Community Summit now! We will send you updates on the final agenda and speakers and post-event updates such as session recordings and upcoming events.

Cloud Engineering Summit Build Track

Kat Cosgrove — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 13:47:25 -0500

The Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is coming up fast, and the speakers are out! To get you ready to attend, let’s take a look at the sessions for the Build track.

The Cloud Engineering Summit’s three tracks are built around three concepts: Build, Manage, and Deploy. I’m Kat Cosgrove, and I was responsible for selecting your speakers for the Build track! For us, that means building cloud applications and infrastructure with Modern Infrastructure as Code using general purpose programming languages. We embrace the fact that modern cloud applications have blurred the lines between the application and the infrastructure, and that success requires at least some level of proficiency in both. Whether you’re full stack or lean more towards one area, all cloud engineers apply a software engineering mindset and practices to building and testing applications and the underlying cloud infrastructure. This includes using standard programming languages, applying software principles such as reusability and abstractions and testing, and leveraging the rich ecosystem of software development tools.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at each of the talks I’ve selected for you!

Starting us off is the inimitable Kris Nóva with Infrastructure as Software. She’s going to be talking about why Turing complete config management is an antipattern, and why we should be putting the Dev back in DevOps. Nóva is an incredible speaker and engineer. Any talk she gives promises to be hot fire, so I wouldn’t miss this one.

Don’t like repeating yourself? Yeah, me neither. Fortunately, we have Sam Cogan to present his talk, Reuse, Don’t Repeat - Creating an Infrastructure as Code Module Library. Personally, I’m a huge fan of reusable modules for any purpose, when they’re built in such a way that it reduces overall toil and makes your codebase easier to understand. This talk should be useful for everyone.

Helping us ask and answer the right questions to make organizational and technological decisions is Joep Piscaer, presenting Kubernetes isn’t the answer, but what was the question again? I love Kubernetes, but it can be complex, and sometimes that complexity means it’s not the right solution for you (yet.) If you struggle with finding the right questions to ask about your tech needs, this talk could help.

I’m kind of nosy. I like knowing as much as possible about what’s going on inside of my applications and infrastructure. It’s hard to present all of that data in a way that’s easy to consume rather than overwhelming, though. Fortunately, we have Liz Fong-Jones to help out with her talk, What is OpenTelemetry? Don’t miss this one if you’re curious about a better way to gain insights into your distributed systems.

You’d think that when a particular tool is widely accepted as the industry standard for accomplishing a task, there’d be a wealth of information out there on how to accomplish most important tasks in an accessible, actionable way. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case. Fortunately, we have Steve Giguere presenting Hands-on: Taking a K8s Deployment from Default to Secure, wherein he’ll take us through securing an NGINX deployment!

Curious about how a big product gets built? Rahul Sharma is with us to talk about How AWS architects APIs for hyper scale. He won’t just be talking technology; we’ll also hear about the cultural changes required internally to launch a product, and how engagement with customers and partners helps shape the course of development.

Last but certainly not least is Heidi Waterhouse presenting The Future Should Be Uneven, a talk about personalization and accessibility in web design. Accessible design benefits us all, whether we actually need the accommodation or not. The sooner we all understand and embrace that, the better, so Heidi will walk us through some common accessibility settings that are really just good design for everyone.

Explore all of the rest of the great sessions, and don’t forget to register for the cloud engineering summit!

Preview of the Deploy Track at Cloud Engineering Summit 2021

Laura Santamaria — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 09:00:00 -0500

Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is almost here! We’ve got a great line up this year.

Our tracks are built around the three pillars of cloud engineering: Build, Deploy, and Manage. I’m your track chair for the Deploy track, the track focused on automating and managing infrastructure. Deploy is all about unifying systems so everything in a cloud-based system is shipped together from the same automated, auditable process, reducing human error and improving quality across the board. That could mean focusing on automated testing and linting of infrastructure as code, providing shared services platforms for others to use in their pipelines, or exploring how unified and automated infrastructure changes engineering culture in an organization.

In no particular order, let’s go explore the Deploy track lineup.

Trying to get a handle on way too many environments across your pipelines? Adora Nwodo, Software Engineer at Microsoft, will explore bringing standard software engineering practices to solve the problem of maintaining many environments and configurations in a repeatable fashion. Adora has a very accessible way of explaining complex concepts in her blog and videos (find her at AdoraHacks), and I’m really looking forward to getting her perspective.

How can we improve the security of these unified processes? Alyssa Miller, Business Information Security Officer (BISO) at S&P Global Ratings, will discuss how threat modeling can improve CI/CD pipelines and general security. I’m excited to have Alyssa join us to help us understand how security should be part of the Deploy pillar; her Pitmaster’s Guide to Security is really good and I recommend watching it!

When you’re trying to share what you’re doing, you could share your code, but how do you share your infrastructure? Peter McKee, Head of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Docker, will demonstrate how to build into pipelines the ability to share features and changes in applications with others as a continuous preview. Peter’s a fantastic teacher who always has a great hands-on presentation in his back pocket, so I’m really looking forward to finding out what he has in store for us.

Data builds up while you’re building out, deploying, and managing cloud-based systems. How can you manage data while deploying your cloud infrastructure? Andy Dang, Co-Founder and Engineering Lead at WhyLabs, will talk about data integrity, observability, and monitoring with an open-source project called whylogs. Always love having a preview of an open-source project in the program, and I think data’s going to continue to be a big question for cloud engineering, so Andy’s talk was very welcome!

What about ARM-based systems? Apple certainly got into the game with their M1 chip, so it’s a platform you have to consider when doing deployments. Angel Rivera, Senior Developer Advocate at CircleCI, will explore how to make pipelines and workloads ARM compatible and capable of supporting ARM on various products. ARM-based systems are some of my favorites (yay Arduino and Raspberry Pi!), and they’re also really important considerations if you’re in the mobile or embedded space, so I can’t wait to hear Angel’s take.

How about some focus on doing all of this at scale? Jenna Pederson, Developer Advocate at AWS, will explore how bringing all of the best practices from software development to pipelines will help make working with cloud-based resources consistent and secure. I’m so happy Jenna could join us! Her content is wonderfully accessible and really explains technical concepts and complex systems clearly for all levels (which is my jam!). You don’t want to miss her talk!

Finally, how does all of this stuff work in a real life team? Evan Bradley, Software Engineer, and Tom Carrio, Senior Software Engineer, from Dynatrace are going to take us through bringing it all together with a real-life team, discussing the experiences they’ve had over time as they’ve implemented everything. I’m really excited to have folks bring their stories of what it’s all like so we can share pitfalls and solutions to move forward together. I think you’ll enjoy Evan and Tom’s talk, too!

Explore all the sessions, and don’t forget to register for Cloud Engineering Summit. I can’t wait to chat with you virtually at Cloud Engineering Summit 2021!

Preview of the Manage Track at Cloud Engineering Summit 2021

Matty Stratton — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 08:00:00 -0500

The Cloud Engineering Summit 2021 is coming up fast, and the speakers are out! To get you ready to attend, let’s take a look at the sessions for the Manage track.

The Cloud Engineering Summit’s three tracks are built around three concepts: Build, Manage, and Deploy. I’m Matt Stratton, and I’m your charismatic track chair for Manage. For us, that means managing cloud applications and infrastructure with Policy as Code, visibility, and access controls. For example, managing infrastructure with policies that detect configuration drift, enforce best practices, and even prevent compliance violations before deployment. It means building visibility across your cloud infrastructure so that you always understand its current and past states, including detailed audit history. Finally, you ensure the right guardrails and controls are set in place so that distributed teams can securely develop.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at each of the talks I’ve selected for you!

Overwhelmed by permissions and authorization? Me, too. Fortunately, we have Joy Ebertz presenting Authorization: Ensuring Only Ada Can Access Her Files. Joy is going to cover the various authorization models available to us, with use-cases for each. Authorization can be overwhelming if you don’t have a good grasp of the options available to your organization and an understanding of what works when, so I’m excited for this one.

Taking a higher-level view, Quintessence Anx will be presenting DevSecOps and Secure Incident Response. The introduction of security to the DevOps equation means some shifts in the way we think about the software development lifecycle, and Quintessence is uniquely qualified to talk about why that’s true. A look inside PagerDuty’s 14 Step Secure Incident Response process promises to be interesting for anyone involved in either development or operations.

I don’t think we have the ability to predict the future, but J. Paul Reed wonders if we can develop the ability to forecast incidents just as we have learned to have staggeringly accurate weather short-term forecasts. With Forecasting the Future: Creating a Radar for Risk, Paul will share with us how Netflix uses Risk Radar to collect and make sense of risk in their sociotechnical systems.

When we talk about infrastructure as code, there’s more to it than just the code! Fariba Khan and Stephen Van Gordon will take us on a journey with Lifecycle of a Pulumi Program to share how they leverage a custom state backend with SSO, RBAC, and programmatically configurable pipelines powered by CI/CD tooling and the Pulumi Automation API to drive IaC at their organization.

Snowflake’s Charles Xu will be here to talk about Day-two Operation of Multi-cloud Kubernetes and Vault, a very cool overview of Snowflake’s Kubernetes infrastructure and how Pulumi helps, from blue-green updates, to managing Hashicorp Vault, to rotating TLS certificates. This is a pretty complex topic, so I’m very interested to see where it goes!

Gremlin’s Jason Yee comes to us with Trailblazers: exploration, discovery, & navigating failure - a set of topics that I personally find fascinating and essential! I think we are constantly in a state of discovery and understanding of our complex systems, and learning how to explore them - and work through the inevitable failures - helps us build and operate even more reliable systems.

Rounding things out is the always incredible Tim Banks, with Toxic Velocity: Speed Kills. In this talk, Tim is going to cover the various stressors that put pressure on both organizations and individuals, how they affect us, and what it looks like when things start to spiral out of control. I’m excited for this one because while crashes do happen, we’d all like them to happen less often (or not at all!), and being able to identify some of these things before they become a real problem is better for our businesses and our people.

Explore all of the rest of the great sessions, and don’t forget to register for the cloud engineering summit!

PulumiUP: the Event for Cloud Engineers

Wendy Smith — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

We spent a lot of time considering how to best engage and share announcements with our community and encourage the cloud engineering community’s growth. All of us here at Pulumi recognize how valuable your time is and how much time we’ve all spent on virtual event platforms in the last year. With that in mind, we made a deliberate decision to avoid any all-day or multi-day programming. Instead, we are hosting a short 2-hour keynote that we think you will find insightful and valuable, with best practices and real-life situations that you can learn from and apply to your approach to building, delivering, and managing modern cloud applications.

PulumiUP Agenda - Kicking off on 4/20 at 9 am - 11 am PST - Save your spot

Speakers	Title and Company	Subject
Joe Duffy	Co-Founder and CEO, Pulumi	The Modern Cloud Era: All Software is Cloud Software
Adrian Cockcroft & Aaron Kao	VP of Sustainability Architecture, Amazon VP of Marketing, Pulumi	Discussion: What’s different about building in a modern cloud application world
Justin Fitzhugh	VP of Cloud Engineering, Snowflake	Perspectives from Cloud Engineering Pioneers
Keith Redmond	VP of SaaS Engineering, Fenergo	Perspectives from Cloud Engineering Pioneers
Luke Hoban	CTO, Pulumi	Placing Cloud Engineering in the Hands of Every Developer
Sophia Parafina	Technical Marketing Manager, Pulumi
Komal Ali	Software Engineer

Panel: Hear from the Experts: Planning for the Future of Modern Cloud Applications	Title and Company
Moderator: Kat Cosgrove	Developer Advocate, JFrog
Justin Fitzhugh	VP of Cloud Engineering, Snowflake
Charity Majors	CTO/Co-Founder, Honeycomb
Dana Lawson	VP of Engineering, GitHub

Engineering leadership from Snowflake, the cloud data warehousing organization, and Fenergo, a client lifecycle management provider for the financial services industry, will share their perspectives and experiences practicing cloud engineering for the modern cloud era. Justin Fitzhugh, VP of Cloud Engineering at Snowflake, and Keith Redmond, VP of SaaS Engineering at Fenergo, will each share how they reduced costs while empowering every developer on their team.

Everyone at Pulumi is super excited to be sharing this material with our community. If you are interested in cloud engineering, cloud infrastructure, software development, modern applications, or Pulumi, you want to save your spot for this 2-hour event. Whether you’re a seasoned cloud engineer or just curious to learn what’s all the fuss about cloud engineering, you will learn something new about the future of building on the cloud at PulumiUP. You can also sign up for new workshops and other events occurring in April and May. We’ll miss seeing you in person but hope that changes soon! Pulumipus and I are packing our bags and hoping for the best.

Save your spot today!

Upcoming Workshops and Events

Sophia Parafina — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a new year and it’s time to level up your cloud engineering skills. Pulumi is there to get you started on your cloud engineering journey with workshops and technical sessions.

CI/CD Pipelines for Kubernetes Apps with Pulumi & Codefresh

To kickoff the year we start with a technical session that demonstrates how to continuously deliver both applications and provision infrastructure using Codefresh CI/CD. This session will demonstrate:

The basics of CI/CD using Codefresh.
How to declare cloud resources using Pulumi and your favorite programming languages.
How to define a simple pipeline for Kubernetes deployments.
Practical tests to ensure infrastructure reliability as part of your pipeline.

Taught by Pulumi and Codefresh engineers, you’ll receive a thorough understanding of CI/CD and infrastructure as code best practices.

Intro to Pulumi

If you’re new to infrastructure as code, this workshop is for you. You will learn the fundamentals of Infrastructure as Code through a series of guided exercises using Pulumi’s Cloud Engineering platform. The workshop covers setting up Pulumi, an infrastructure as code platform that uses programming languages to provision modern cloud infrastructure.

This workshop is designed to help users completely new to Pulumi become familiar with the core concepts needed to be effective with the Pulumi Infrastructure as Code platform. We will guide through the Pulumi platform with diagrams and a series of hands on exercises to help you understand the building blocks available in Pulumi.

The workshop will cover the following topics.

What is Pulumi?
How to install Pulumi
Configuring your development environment
Choose your Pulumi language
An introduction to the Pulumi state & the Pulumi Service
An introduction to Pulumi config
Storing sensitive data in Pulumi securely
Provision your first resources
Understanding stacks
An introduction to the Pulumi programming model

We have multiple workshops scheduled from January to March. Register for one today.

Jan 26: Intro to Pulumi, 9 AM PST Feb 9: Intro to Pulumi, 9 AM PST Feb 23: Intro to Pulumi, 9 AM PST March 9: Intro to Pulumi, 9 AM PST

Deploying Microservices with Pulumi and AWS Lambda

This serverless workshop demonstrates how Pulumi can accelerate provisioning of cloud infrastructure. The workshop shows how to build a set of microservices utilizing AWS’s newest Lambda features. Attendees will be guided through the process of provisioning a set of Lambda resources in AWS and see real time examples of how Pulumi’s innovative programming model helps turbocharge cloud engineering.

If you’re an active Pulumi user and building serverless applications this hands-on workshop is for you. You will learn:

How to provision a Lambda function in AWS.
How to provision infrastructure such as DynamoDB & API Gateway to support your microservice applications.
How to take advantage of the newest Lambda features.

Building a Kubernetes Platform in Amazon EKS with Pulumi

Kubernetes is one of the major cloud technologies and in this hands-on workshop, we’ll examine how Pulumi works with Kubernetes through real-world examples of managing Amazon EKS clusters. We’ll focus on building a user-friendly Kubernetes platform, installing software that makes Kubernetes easy to use for application developers.

Attendees will be guided through the process of provisioning an Amazon EKS cluster and installing platform friendly software such as the aws load balancer controller. We’ll cover the following:

How-to provision a production-ready Amazon EKS cluster with key features enabled using Pulumi
Provisioning the aws-load-balancer-controller to automate ingress creation
Install an example application to show the end-to-end user experience for users.

Get a solid foundation for provisioning Kubernetes clusters and applications by signing up.

re:Invent 2020 EKS Feature Releases

Sophia Parafina — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon announced several Elastic Kubernetes Service feature releases and updates during the first week of AWS re:Invent 2020. If we look at all the announcements as a whole, we can see the Kubernetes ecosystem maturing to make deployments and management easier for organizations. Let’s take a look at how they can benefit your use of EKS.

Amazon EKS Distro

First and foremost is the release of Amazon EKS Distro, also called EKS Anywhere. This is the same Kubernetes distro available to Amazon EKS customers on AWS as an open-source project. You can take advantage of a fully supported Kubernetes distribution built from open source with version aligned dependency updates and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) patches. Notifications for patches are sent from Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) with support for backported patches. Read more about EKS Distro here.

You can create a cluster using kubeadm, kops, or tools such as Pulumi. Learn more about creating infrastructure with EKS Distro and Pulumi on our blog.

Logging support for AWS Fargate

Amazon EKS pods running on AWS Fargate can now forward container logs to various AWS services, including Cloudwatch, S3, Elasticsearch, and Kinesis, to enable log storage and analytics. EKS with Fargate includes a native log router, eliminating the need for a sidecar. You can use ConfigMap to send routers to the service of your choice. Read more about it on the AWS blog post.

Simplified install and management for Kubernetes CNI plugin

Amazon EKS now supports installation and management of the VPC CNI. The AWS VPC CNI provides integrated AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networking for Kubernetes clusters. You can use AWS VPC networking and security best practices for building Kubernetes clusters that include VPC routing policies and security groups for network traffic isolation.

You can install and manage the CNI plugin with the Amazon EKS console, CLI, and API. Previously, you needed to install and maintain it manually after a Kubernetes upgrade. Amazon EKS lets you install, manage, and through the EKS console, CLI, and API, where it is validated by AWS and can be deployed and updated. To learn more, read the announcement.

EC2 Spot Instances in managed node groups

Spot Instances are deeply discounted On-Demand EC2 instances. EKS now supports using Spot Instances with EKS managed node groups. If you are running batch process such as ETL with Apache Spark or stateless endpoint, Spot Instances are a cost-effective way for managing surge requests in EKS.

Previously, to use Spot Instances, you had to manually configure EC2 Auto Scaling groups and upgrade the Spot nodes to the current version of Kubernetes. You can now set capacity type as SPOT and the EC2 instance types when creating a managed node group. The managed node group will provision and manage Spot nodes automatically according to best practices. You can create the node group through the EKS console, the EKS API, and eksctl. To learn more about configuring EKS node groups with Spot Instance, read the blog.

Want some hands-on training with EKS? Join our workshop on Thursday, December 10th where you will create a production-ready EKS cluster, install add-ons to prepare your cluster for developers, and finally ship an application to your cluster. Register Now

Pulumi Sweeps into KubeCon

Sophia Parafina — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 14:03:19 -0600

We had a fantastic time at KubeCon in San Diego. At the event, the Pulumi team released two technology previews: Pulumi Crosswalk for Kubernetes and Pulumi Query for Kubernetes.

Crosswalk for Kubernetes is a set of common patterns compiled in playbooks. These patterns reduce the complex Kubernetes API syntax by providing trusted defaults with idiomatic Kubernetes. Checkout a quick introduction to Crosswalk for Kubernetes in this blog post.

Sara Novotny defined observability as “the ability to ask of your system and learn from it” during her keynote with Liz Fong-Jones. Query for Kubernetes enables observability programmatically by exposing resource processes through either batch or streaming queries. Learn more about Query for Kubernetes in our blog post.

To see both Crosswalk and Query for Kubernetes in action, watch the demo video!

Pulumi engineers, Erin Krengel and Sean Holung, presented Are You About to Break Prod? Acceptance Testing with Ephemeral Environments.

Addressing a packed room, they showed how to use ephemeral environments (short lived environments that mimic production) to automate testing. Kudos to the CNCF for making the presentation videos available quickly, you can watch Erin and Sean’s presentation on YouTube.

Joe Duffy sums up our experience below. We hope to see you next year at KubeCon 2020!

Pulumi Meetup: APIs, Custom Resources and GitHub Webhooks

Aydrian Howard — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last Wednesday, we invited members of our local Seattle community to Pulumi HQ for the July Pulumi Up meetup. The evening began with some networking time wherein our guests met some Pulumi engineers and users they may have only ever interacted with over Pulumi’s Community Slack while enjoying free pizza and beverages. This month’s meetup featured two talks by Pulumi engineers.

Application code isn’t the only code that can have APIs

Unfortunately, due to travel issues, Paul Stack wasn’t able to join us in person, but graciously agreed to present remotely… from Europe… at 4:00 in the morning. He presented “Application code isn’t the only code that can have APIs” and went over how programming languages help in building the best infrastructure code. During the talk, he presented a simple Pulumi program for creating an RDS instance and walked through the simple programming constructs he utilized to help create APIs that anyone could code against. Here’s a recording of his talk, with the video also available on the Pulumi TV YouTube Channel.

Automate your troubles away with Webhooks and Pulumi

Next up, Matt Ellis presented “Automating your troubles away with Webhooks and Pulumi.” Matt isn’t a fan of confrontation, but as the lead of the Pulumi API team, he needs to ensure that our changelog is kept up-to-date with every pull request. In his talk, he walked through his solution that leveraged GitHub Webhooks and Pulumi in building a small bot that enforced some policies on pull requests. You can read more about it in his previous blog post on Pulumi Webhooks, or watch the recording of his talk, which is also available on the Pulumi TV YouTube Channel.

After the talks, there was time for more networking and a last chance to get one more slice of pizza. After some more discussions inspired by the speakers, we closed out the evening.

If you’re in the Seattle area, be sure to join the Pulumi - Seattle meetup group and join us for our next Pulumi Up. Otherwise, subscribe to the Pulumi TV YouTube Channel and watch the presentations at your leisure.