Pulumi Blog: User experience

Introducing Dark Mode for Pulumi Cloud

Kimberley Mackenzie — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pulumi Cloud helps teams manage and operate their cloud infrastructure in one place, from state and secrets to deployments, visibility, and policy enforcement.

For a long time, one request has consistently come up from the Pulumi community: dark mode. Today, we’re announcing that this request is now available in Pulumi Cloud.

Light mode and dark mode

Pulumi Cloud supports light mode and dark mode. You can switch themes at any time from the utility bar.

Below: Pulumi Cloud dashboard in light mode and dark mode

Light mode remains the default experience. Dark mode uses lighter text and UI elements on a darker background, which many users prefer for extended sessions or low-light environments.

This update is enabled by recent work from our User Experience team to introduce a shared design system across Pulumi Cloud. With that foundation in place, theming can now be applied consistently across pages and features.

Below: Pulumi Cloud resources page in light mode and dark mode

Dark mode allows you to opt into a theme that uses lighter text and graphics on a darker background. You can also choose to keep the current theme, now known as light mode.

How to enable dark mode

You can update your theme from the utility bar at any time.

Try out dark mode today

Want to try dark mode out for yourself? Sign in to your Pulumi Cloud account, or if you are new to Pulumi, create a free account.

We would love to hear your feedback. You can reach us in the Pulumi Community Slack or share requests in the public GitHub repo.

We look forward to hearing what you think of these changes!

Policy Comes to Team and Enterprise, with New Out-of-the-box Policies and Management Experience

Luke Ward — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pulumi’s Infrastructure as Code has included a powerful policy engine from day one. Over the past year, we’ve been enhancing it significantly to provide stronger governance for modern cloud platforms. Until now, these capabilities were limited to our Business Critical tier. Today, we’re excited to announce that policy guardrails are now available to all Team and Enterprise customers. Alongside this, we’re launching a redesigned policy management experience and introducing out-of-the-box policy packs that make it easier than ever to secure, govern, and optimize your cloud environments—even when powered by AI agents like Pulumi Neo.

Policy as Guardrails for AI Infrastructure

As developer velocity accelerates, AI agents like Neo are helping teams create and manage infrastructure at unprecedented speed. That speed creates a governance challenge: how do you ensure security, compliance, and cost-effectiveness without slowing developers down?

Policy guardrails provide the answer. Pulumi’s Policy as Code (PaC) framework applies DevOps best practices to governance, letting you codify rules, test them through pull requests, and version them alongside your infrastructure. With policies in place, you can ensure that every change stays within your organization’s standards, whether it is a human developer or Neo making a change.

What Makes Pulumi Policy Different

Unlike many other policy solutions, Pulumi Policy uses general-purpose programming languages such as TypeScript and Python rather than restrictive DSLs or YAML. This unlocks richer and more flexible capabilities, including:

Conditional logic to codify your organization’s nuanced rules.
Reusable functions and abstractions to create a shared library of policies.
Unit tests to validate policy behavior before rollout.

With today’s updates, this foundation is easier to adopt and scale across your teams than ever before.

New Simplified Experience

While Pulumi Policy has always allowed you to enforce compliance using TypeScript and Python, the existing workflow could be cumbersome—discovering policies required switching between the console and CLI, and applying them involved multiple steps.

We’ve removed that friction to provide the seamless guardrails needed for this high-velocity, AI-driven world. The new experience is built around a streamlined, in-console workflow for discovering, applying, and managing your policies.

In-Console Discoverability

We are making it easier to find and understand policy packs. You can now browse a rich set of pre-built policy packs directly within the Pulumi Cloud console—no CLI or context switching required.

You’ll find:

A rich browsing experience: See all available policy packs in one place.
Detailed information: Each pack comes with a clear description of the policies included.
Organization-approved packs: Org admins can curate a list of approved policy packs, ensuring your teams—and AI agents like Neo—are using a vetted set of policies.

New Pre-Built Policy Packs

To help you establish guardrails immediately, we have authored several pre-built policy packs. We are excited to highlight two that are available today:

Pulumi Best Practices: A foundational set of recommended governance and security controls that serves as a strong starting point for any organization.
HITRUST CSF v11.5: Provides predefined controls that help align cloud resources with HITRUST CSF requirements.

Streamlined Policy Management and Application

The new policy management experience dramatically simplifies policy application:

Intuitive Interface: Browse, select, and apply policies through a streamlined workflow using Policy Groups to bundle related policies and apply them to your stacks or cloud accounts.
Expanded Scale: We’ve eliminated the 4,000 stack UI limit on policy groups, allowing you to scale policies across your entire infrastructure.
Granular Enforcement: Configure the enforcement level (advisory or mandatory) for policies to either warn developers or block non-compliant deployments entirely.

Preventative and Audit Approaches

Pulumi Policy supports two complementary approaches to governance.

Preventative policies: Block non-compliant deployments during pulumi up, providing real-time guardrails for developers and AI agents.
Audit policies: Continuously scan existing resources for ongoing compliance monitoring, giving you a complete picture of your cloud security posture.

This dual approach ensures new deployments meet standards while maintaining visibility across your entire infrastructure. Learn more in our Preventative vs. Audit Policies guide.

How to Get Started

Getting started with the new policy management experience is straightforward:

Browse Policy Packs: Navigate to the Policies tab in your Pulumi Cloud console to discover pre-built policy packs like Pulumi Best Practices and HITRUST CSF. Learn more about Policy as Code configuration and setup.
Choose Your Approach: Decide whether you need preventative policies (to block non-compliant deployments during pulumi up) or audit policies (for continuous compliance monitoring across all cloud resources).
Create Policy Groups: Set up policy groups to bundle related policies and apply them to your stacks or cloud accounts.
Configure Enforcement: Set enforcement levels (advisory, mandatory, or remediate) for each policy based on your requirements.

Now Available To Team and Enterprise Customers

To ensure every organization can build with confidence, these policy management enhancements and the pulumi-best-practices policy packs are now available to Team and Enterprise customers. Checkout our pricing page for more information.

Conclusion

Governance doesn’t need to be a roadblock—it can be a foundation that accelerates innovation. With enhanced policy management and ready-to-use guardrails, Pulumi helps your teams and AI agents like Neo move fast while staying secure, compliant, and cost effective.

Try the new experience in Pulumi Cloud today, and let us know what you think in the Pulumi Community Slack.

Run Pulumi with Any TypeScript Version

Julien Poissonnier — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:28:28 +0200

Pulumi allows you to use the best features of programming languages to build your infrastructure while ensuring compatibility with your current development environments. To this end Pulumi provides a seamless experience when authoring TypeScript programs, managing the compilation of your program for you. With the latest release of our Node.js SDK, we’ve made this even more flexible by making it easier than ever to choose the version of TypeScript you want to use.

Each new release of TypeScript comes with new features and improved type checking, as well as support for the latest JavaScript features. Using the latest version of TypeScript provides you with the maximum flexibility for creating types and gives you more confidence that your program will behave as expected.

Until now, Pulumi’s seamless experience was limited to using Pulumi’s builtin TypeScript version 3.8. If you wanted to use a more recent version, you had to introduce a build step to your project and let Pulumi run in plain Javascript mode. With the release of the Pulumi Node.js SDK 3.113.0 you can now use any version of TypeScript by adding it as a dependency to your project’s package.json file.

Pulumi supports all TypeScript versions from 3.8 and up, including TypeScript 5.4.

If you have an existing project, you can upgrade your project to the latest versions of TypeScript and Pulumi by running:

npm add typescript@^5.4.5 @pulumi/pulumi@^3.113.0

We have also updated our Pulumi templates to include the latest version of TypeScript. To create a new project, run:

pulumi new

Adding TypeScript as a dependency to your project is optional, as TypeScript and ts-node are optional peer dependencies of the Node.js SDK. This makes it easy to use a single version of TypeScript or ts-node within monorepos. To ensure backward compatibility, Pulumi ships with bundled versions of TypeScript 3.8 and ts-node 7, and falls back to these versions if they are not installed in your project’s node modules.

Example

Let’s show an example of how to use one of TypeScripts’s new features with Pulumi. TypeScript 4.1 introduced Template Literal Types, which allow you to build types using template literals. Imagine you wanted to enforce that names of S3 buckets are all lower case and always start with a given prefix. Of course you can check this at runtime, but with Template Literal Types this can be enforced during typechecking.

type prefix = `acme_corp`
type BucketName = Lowercase<`${prefix}_${string}`>;

We can create a custom Bucket subclass that expects a name matching our new BucketName type.

import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";
import * as aws from "@pulumi/aws";

type prefix = `acme_corp`
type BucketName = Lowercase<`${prefix}_${string}`>;

class AcmeCorpBucket extends aws.s3.Bucket {
 constructor(name: BucketName, args?: aws.s3.BucketArgs, opts?: pulumi.CustomResourceOptions) {
 super(name, args, opts);
 }
}

const myBucketWrong = new AcmeCorpBucket("MyBucket");
// ❌ Fails typechecking with: Argument of type '"MyBucket"' is not assignable to parameter of type '`acme_corp_${Lowercase<string>}`'.ts(2345)

const myBucketWrongAgain = new AcmeCorpBucket("acme_corp_MyBucket");
// ❌ Fails typechecking with: Argument of type '"acme_corp_MyBucket"' is not assignable to parameter of type '`acme_corp_${Lowercase<string>}`'.ts(2345)

const myBucketCorrect = new AcmeCorpBucket("acme_corp_my_bucket");
// ✅ Passes typechecking

This example shows just one of Typescript’s many new features that have shipped since version 3.8, and now all are available for you to use in your Pulumi programs without jumping through hoops.

Conclusion

We recently shipped improved support for Node.js monorepos, and with the latest version of the Pulumi Node.js SDK, we further improved how Pulumi integrates into your development environment by letting you easily pick the version of TypeScript to use.

The New and Improved Pulumi Service console

Meagan Cojocar — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Pulumi Service is the easiest way to use Pulumi’s open source, universal infrastructure as code SDK at scale and provides a fully managed experience. It handles infrastructure state and secrets, sets up SAML SSO, integrates with CI/CD pipelines, and enforces compliance rules.

It’s been nearly four years since the Pulumi Service launched back in 2018. In these last four years, our customer base has grown significantly and as a result, the Service’s features and capabilities have grown with it.

We’ve added features like audit logs, SAML SSO and SCIM, Teams, Organization and Team Access Tokens, and much more! But throughout all these changes, the look and feel of the Service has largely stayed the same—until now! Today we’re excited to launch a set of improvements to the overall user experience of the Pulumi Service. These updates include:

Increased organizational insights on the Service Dashboard
Quick access to stacks with a new Stack Favorites feature
Easier navigation around the Service with a new left navigation pane

These changes came directly from consultation with our users and we’ve spent time with customers in the past few weeks refining it. One of these customers was dutchie, an all-in-one technology platform powering the cannabis industry with Point of Sale, Ecommerce, Payments, and more. “The new Pulumi Service console is a change we are really excited to see, literally. It has better use of white space and an improved balance of information on the Dashboard at the same time and that shows a real and welcome focus on user experience. It is a genuine quality of life improvement in a portion of the product that we use daily.” said Jordan Rinke, Infrastructure Architect at dutchie.

Want to try these features out for yourself? Sign in to your Pulumi Service account or if you are new to Pulumi, create a free account.

Increased organizational insights on the Service Dashboard

Lastly, we’ve made significant changes to the Pulumi Service dashboard. Now you can access more information to help survey your operations at a glance.

Organizations can access some quick usage statistics at the top of their dashboards:

Member count and +/- change in the past week
Total stack count and percent change in the past week
Total resource count and percent change in the past week
Number of successful updates in the past day, week, month, and year

If you’re part of an organization, you’ll also see a “Members” card that tracks recently joined members. If you’re an admin, you can manage any pending invites from this card.

We’ve also exposed more operation updates in the “Latest Stack Activity” card. You can see up to ten most recent updates and favorite those stacks directly from the dashboard card.

Quick access to stacks with a new Stack Favorites feature

Many Pulumi users have access to dozens of hundreds of stacks. But only a few of those stacks may require regular interaction. We’ve introduced a new Stack Favorites feature to let you flag the stacks that are most important. This way you can access those stacks from anywhere in the Service.

Your favorites list is your own. Even if you’re part of an organization, your favorites won’t be shared with anyone other than you. And you can have as many favorites as you like!

Look for the star icon next to any stack name and select it to start building your favorites list.

You can access the favorites list from two key locations in the Service: the left navigation pane and the dashboard. All your favorites will appear in the navigation pane under the “Stacks” heading. You’ll also have your list of favorites in a new dashboard card.

Among the biggest changes to the feel of the Service is our new left navigation pane. Navigation items like your Dashboard, Stacks, and Settings are accessible in the new pane from anywhere in the Service.

The navigation pane consolidates actions and information so it’s easy for you to find common items. You’ll find options in the pane to:

Switch between your individual account and any other organizations you’re part of
Create new organizations
Access Stack Favorites
Directly access sub-pages like Billing or Access Tokens
Send us your feedback!

These changes will help you move through the Pulumi Service without losing your place and to ensure convenient access to key pages. You can even collapse the navigation pane for more screen real estate and still access any page you need.

If you’re looking for your account details, they have moved into the black utility toolbar. To access your account settings or logout of the Pulumi Service, select your profile image at the top right of your browser window.

Try out the Pulumi Service today

We’d love for you to try out the new and improved Pulumi Service console! Don’t hesitate to reach out on the Pulumi Community Slack about any thoughts and feelings you have about these changes or any and all things Pulumi! We also have a public GitHub repo to track any requests related to the Service.

These changes wouldn’t be possible without the users who generously gave their time to have a conversation with us. We’ll continue to translate user feedback into a better Pulumi experience.

We look forward to hearing what you think of these changes!

Pulumi Blog: User experience

Introducing Dark Mode for Pulumi Cloud

Light mode and dark mode

Below: Pulumi Cloud dashboard in light mode and dark mode

Below: Pulumi Cloud resources page in light mode and dark mode

How to enable dark mode

Try out dark mode today

Policy Comes to Team and Enterprise, with New Out-of-the-box Policies and Management Experience

Policy as Guardrails for AI Infrastructure

What Makes Pulumi Policy Different

New Simplified Experience

In-Console Discoverability

New Pre-Built Policy Packs

Streamlined Policy Management and Application

Preventative and Audit Approaches

How to Get Started

Now Available To Team and Enterprise Customers

Conclusion

Run Pulumi with Any TypeScript Version

Example

Conclusion

The New and Improved Pulumi Service console

Increased organizational insights on the Service Dashboard

Quick access to stacks with a new Stack Favorites feature

Easier navigation around the Service with a new left navigation pane

Try out the Pulumi Service today