1. Pulumi Templates
  2. Virtual Machine Templates
  3. Virtual Machine on AWS

Virtual Machine on AWS

The Virtual Machine template creates an infrastructure as code project in your favorite language that deploys a virtual machine to AWS. You can then use the virtual machine to build your own web application, backend service, or database. The architecture includes Amazon EC2 for the virtual machine and Amazon VPC for the virtual network. The template generates a complete Pulumi program, including a simple HTTP server, to give you a working project out of the box that you can customize easily and extend to suit your needs.

An architecture diagram of the Pulumi $CLOUD $ARCHITECTURE template

Using this template

To use this template to deploy your own virtual machine, make sure you’ve installed Pulumi and configured your AWS credentials, then create a new project using the template in your language of choice:

$ mkdir my-virtual-machine && cd my-virtual-machine
$ pulumi new vm-aws-typescript
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (vm-aws-typescript) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-virtual-machine && cd my-virtual-machine
$ pulumi new vm-aws-python
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (vm-aws-python) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-virtual-machine && cd my-virtual-machine
$ pulumi new vm-aws-go
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (vm-aws-go) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-virtual-machine && cd my-virtual-machine
$ pulumi new vm-aws-csharp
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (vm-aws-csharp) in the Pulumi Service.
$ mkdir my-virtual-machine && cd my-virtual-machine
$ pulumi new vm-aws-yaml
Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (vm-aws-yaml) in the Pulumi Service.

Follow the prompts to complete the new-project wizard. When it’s done, you’ll have a complete Pulumi project that’s ready to deploy and configured with the most common settings. Feel free to inspect the code in index.js index.ts __main__.py main.go Program.cs Program.fs Program.vb App.java Pulumi.yaml for a closer look.

Deploying the project

The template requires no additional configuration. Once the new project is created, you can deploy it immediately with pulumi up:

$ pulumi up

When the deployment completes, Pulumi exports the following stack output values:

ip
The IP address of the EC2 instance.
hostname
The provider-assigned hostname of the EC2 instance.
url
The fully-qualified HTTP URL of the HTTP server running on the EC2 instance.

Output values like these are useful in many ways, most commonly as inputs for other stacks or related cloud resources. The computed url, for example, can be used from the command line to open the newly deployed website in your favorite web browser:

$ open $(pulumi stack output url)

Customizing the project

Projects created with the Virtual Machine template expose the following configuration settings:

instanceType
The EC2 instance type to use for the VM. Defaults to t3.micro.
vpcNetworkCidr
The network CIDR to use for the VPC. Defaults to 10.0.0.0/16.

All of these settings are optional and may be adjusted either by editing the stack configuration file directly (by default, Pulumi.dev.yaml) or by changing their values with pulumi config set as shown below.

Cleaning up

You can cleanly destroy the stack and all of its infrastructure with pulumi destroy:

$ pulumi destroy

Learn more

Congratulations! You’re now well on your way to managing a production-grade virtual machine on AWS with Pulumi — and there’s lots more you can do from here: