Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Pulumi can provide enormous amounts of leverage, but they must be used correctly to also provide safety. One of our main jobs as infrastructure engineers is to not break things, so leverage without safety is useless. If something is safe, we can change things easily without even thinking about it. If it isn’t, we’ll be up until 2 a.m. fixing what we broke.
The central principle of cloud engineering is adopting software engineering practices. Refactoring is a technique for making changes to code that improve maintainability, enhance performance, scalability, and security without changing its external behavior. In devops, refactoring often occurs with modern applications; however, we can apply those same techniques to cloud infrastructure with infrastructure as code.
Guest Article: Ringo De Smet, Founder of Cumundi, standardizes on Pulumi for writing infrastructure as reusable code libraries for his customers. Pulumi enables him to rapidly iterate through the build-test-release cycle of these building blocks.
Cumundi helps companies adopt cloud infrastructure in a more integral way. It has found that 75% of companies’ needs are covered by ‘vanilla’ infrastructure patterns. However, due to a shortage of people and time, there has been limited investment to take full advantage of cloud-native configurations - which can lead to inefficiency, poor performance, and higher costs.