Pulumi cloud engineering boosts dev infrastructure control

Pulumi Automation API enhances local testing

This Pulumi release also includes a new Automation API that makes infrastructure resources available as a library, which developers can embed within their application code, and test alongside it.

Pulumi's native cloud providers underpin shareable Pulumi Packages, blocks of code that describe sets of infrastructure resources. The Automation API directs how they are within developers' applications. This API can be treated like any other library, which means developers can easily test infrastructure-as-code plans on workstations before they're deployed to staging environments.

The new API will save more time and effort for Fenergo's development teams, Redmond said.

The future of cloud engineering will see developers looking to work more locally…Automation API will let them test and tear down infrastructure before it's released to any real environment.

"The future of cloud engineering will see developers looking to work more locally," he said. "It's expensive and time-consuming to work against the actual cloud. The Automation API will let devs test and tear down infrastructure before it's released to any real environment."

In future releases, Redmond said he hopes for more help from Pulumi in meeting Fenergo's regulatory compliance requirements, through more detailed workflow approvals and audit trail visualizations.

"We can get the data we need, but we'd like to see more detailed audit trails for individual resources and build approval chains into Pulumi," he said. Fenergo has an approval gate when its GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline hands off to Pulumi and after the Pulumi stage before cloud infrastructure is spun up, but he said he'd like to add more such steps as Pulumi executes.

Pulumi integrates with third-party CI/CD providers for such workflows but has plans to build more fine-grained controls directly into the product on its midterm roadmap, according to CEO Joe Duffy. Pulumi 3.0 contains the product's first set of dashboards, and the vendor's roadmap also includes better filtering and searching across resources and audit logs, Duffy said.

Meanwhile, Pulumi has taken the place of DevOps engineers and IT ops specialists for Fenergo, which Redmond said has been crucial for the company as it transitions from an on-premises software vendor to a SaaS provider.

"I'd need a team of five or six DevOps engineers in place if I didn't have Pulumi," Redmond said. "That's more than a million Euros [in salary] that's gone to product developers instead."

Pulumi's competitive questions remain

Though Pulumi's infrastructure-as-code tools were previously based on Terraform providers, the company has taken an aggressive stance against the infrastructure-as-code leader that locked up the Kubernetes infrastructure-as-code market before Pulumi was founded.

Torsten Volk

"Kubernetes and Terraform go together most of the time," said Torsten Volk, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "They're like an old married couple at this point."

Pulumi distinguishes itself with a strong focus on appealing to developers and working in their preferred programming language, while Terraform approaches infrastructure as code with ops and DevOps specialists in mind. Developers can use Pulumi Packages in their preferred programming language even if they were written in another, for example.

This differentiation will have the most appeal to companies such as Fenergo that want software engineers to own the full application stack, including cloud infrastructure, but it remains an open question how widespread such scenarios will be.

"The biggest challenge here is how to get developers to use and care at all about policy and provisioning [tools]," Volk said. "Pulumi pops up in a lot of different places in our market research, but they'll have to step things up from a competitive perspective to get more mind share against Terraform."

DevOps and full-stack engineering are popular buzzwords, but in reality, many developers don't want to deal with managing infrastructure, Volk said. Meanwhile, HashiCorp's recent Terraform-focused partnership with Cisco will raise its profile further among traditional enterprises.

"I don't hear of many people using [Pulumi] across their whole company yet," he said. "But a lot of people do complain about Terraform, when they have to code things over and over again."

Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, is an award-winning veteran of IT journalism. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @PariseauTT.