This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Pavindu Lakshan
What is Pulumi and how it’s transforming the Cloud DevOps landscape
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables developers to configure and manage the Cloud infrastructure programmatically. There are many different IaC tools in the market. But learning and adopting such a tool isn’t easy.
Therefore an IaC tool with a minimum learning curve had always been a central point of discussion.
Why Pulumi?
Pulumi, an IaC tool released in mid-2018, seems to address this problem well. As a result, it is rapidly becoming one of the most popular IaC tools out there.
Let’s investigate why many DevOps teams have started picking up Pulumi as the IaC tool of choice.
1. Multi-language support
In contrast to other existing tools, Pulumi supports multiple general programming languages including Node.js, Go, Python, and my favorite language, TypeScript.
You can also write unit tests and integration tests, in your familiar testing libraries, to test your infrastructure configurations.
For example, we can create a new AWS S3 bucket and attach a lambda function as an event handler to it, using TypeScript.
import * as aws from “@pulumi/aws”;
// Create a bucket using IaC.
const myBucket = new aws.s3.Bucket(“mybucket”);
// Create an AWS Lambda event handler for the S3 bucket.
myBucket.onObjectCreated(“myBucketHandler”, (e) => {
// lambda function code goes here.
});
2. Consistent growth
It is already having 9.5K stars on GitHub and gained consistent growth with downloads.
3. Generous free plan
If you want to try out Pulumi, you can start with their free tier, which is more than enough to do all your experiments before migrating without any cost. In addition, it is forever free for personal use, and there are 150,000 free credits each month, even if you are in the paid plan.
4. Dry-run support
Terraform is one of the leading IaC tools out there, famous due to its dry-run support. In Terraform, the terraform plan command shows a preview of the scheduled updates to a stack so that developers can verify that no unintended changes are deployed.
Pulumi too supports this dry run feature through the pulumi preview command. In addition, Pulumi utilizes Terraform providers if a native provider doesn’t exist.
Therefore, you shouldn’t worry if you are migrating to Pulumi from Terraform. Pulumi has already got you covered.
5. Easy migration from other IaC tools
Pulumi makes migrating from other IaC tools convenient. It has converters for the below types.
- ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates
- Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinitions
- Terraform HCL (Harshicorp Configuration Language)
Therefore, we can migrate from the above types to Pulumi-supported general-purpose language of your choice with semi-automation.
6. Convention over configuration
There are well-establish patterns in Cloud architecture to address specific problems. So, instead of writing IaC for each module, why not combine them and abstract away the complexities?
Pulumi CrossWalks precisely does this. It is a suite of libraries and best practices that allow us to provision Cloud Infrastructure in few lines of code. Besides, it ensures that we follow the industry best practices maximizing efficiency and security.
Using Pulumi in Practice
Let’s see how we can use Pulumi with AWS. The following code provisions a t2.micro AWS EC2 instance with the specified security rules.
Then, you can also write Unit Tests with any testing framework you prefer. Here I have used Mocha for the demo.
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Wrapping Up
Pulumi is gaining popularity with its multiple programming language support, including TypeScript.
Therefore, learning and getting adapted to it is much easier than any other IaC tool.
Although it’s relatively new, Pulumi continues to invade Devops pretty fast, despite the lack of learning resources. In my opinion, more and more DevOps teams will pick up Pulumi as their IaC tool of choice as more people get aware of it.
Thank you all for reading !!!
Learn More
- Optimizing Serverless in AWS
- Design Patterns in TypeScript
- Will Bit Replace npm?
- 5 Strategies for Smart DevOps in Single Page Apps
Infrastructure as Code in TypeScript with Pulumi was originally published in Bits and Pieces on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Pavindu Lakshan
Pavindu Lakshan | Sciencx (2021-08-17T14:12:23+00:00) Infrastructure as Code in TypeScript with Pulumi. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/08/17/infrastructure-as-code-in-typescript-with-pulumi/
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