October 2018 Summaries

The Helm community has developed extensive expertise in creating Kubernetes manifests, but challenges arise when interfacing with managed databases like AWS RDS or Azure CosmosDB. Pulumi, a cloud-native development platform, provides a solution by allowing infrastructure to be expressed as code in familiar programming languages, facilitating the integration of Kubernetes applications with cloud resources. An illustrative example involves using Pulumi to manage Azure and Kubernetes resources, such as creating an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster, a MongoDB-flavored instance of CosmosDB, and deploying a Node.js Helm Chart that utilizes the CosmosDB connection. Pulumi supports deployments across major cloud vendors and Kubernetes, using standard $KUBECONFIG files for compatibility with tools like Helm and kubectl. The platform simplifies cloud-native infrastructure as code by reducing complexity and friction in choosing and combining services from various cloud providers within a consistent programming model.

Pulumi is a company founded on the belief that the cloud fundamentally transforms software development, offering an opportunity to rethink the entire process with engineers at the center. Leveraging advancements in programming languages, runtimes, and cloud technologies, Pulumi integrates development and operations through cloud engineering, allowing developers to use familiar general-purpose programming languages to manage cloud infrastructure. This approach reduces complexity and improves productivity by enabling testing, refactoring, and collaboration within the cloud software development process. Pulumi has successfully attracted a passionate community and raised $15 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital to further develop its open-source platform. The company supports major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes, and recently launched a Team Edition of its SaaS delivery platform to enhance operational capabilities. Pulumi aims to continue expanding its offerings, including new languages and integrations, while strengthening its commitment to open source and community engagement.

Pulumi has announced a partnership with GitHub to leverage the new GitHub Actions feature, enhancing the continuous delivery capabilities of cloud applications and infrastructure. This collaboration allows developers to use Pulumi in conjunction with GitHub Actions to automate deployments across various cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, or on-premises setups, streamlining the process without the need for complex scripts or manual steps. The integration enables infrastructure as code practices, allowing changes to be triggered by GitHub events like commits and pull requests, thereby facilitating a seamless workflow for deploying and managing cloud resources. The setup involves creating workflow files, configuring secrets, and adding Pulumi programs, with the optional use of Pulumi’s GitHub App for improved integration and deployment insights. A demonstration video from the GitHub Universe keynote showcases the deployment of a Ruby on Rails application to a Kubernetes cluster, illustrating the ease and power of this new capability. This partnership promises to provide developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs with an efficient and enjoyable way to achieve continuous deployment, further supported by resources and guides for getting started with this innovative approach.

Pulumi revolutionizes infrastructure as code by allowing developers to use familiar programming languages instead of YAML or domain-specific languages, simplifying the development of serverless functions such as AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions. This approach integrates serverless code directly into application code, removing the need for separate configuration and management. Pulumi leverages JavaScript's dynamic nature to create "magic functions," automatically handling deployment complexities like dependencies and runtime configurations, allowing developers to focus on writing event-driven code. By utilizing advanced analysis techniques, Pulumi ensures that all necessary components are included in the final deployment, eliminating manual configuration headaches. This process not only simplifies serverless programming but also enhances development efficiency by supporting automatic updates and dependency tracking, making it easier to modify and redeploy code. Pulumi's method streamlines the serverless experience by eliminating the need for additional configuration files or cloud console interactions, instead allowing developers to manage everything via straightforward code execution.

Part 3 of the series on the Kubernetes API delves into the complexities and dynamics of the Deployment resource, exploring how changes are rolled out over ReplicaSets, which manage the replication of Pods within a cluster. The post employs kubespy, a tool for observing Kubernetes resources in real-time, to elucidate the process of Deployment rollouts, including how the system adapts when a Pod crashes, is killed, or is relabeled. By using kubespy trace, readers can follow the lifecycle of a Deployment and understand the interplay between Deployment, ReplicaSet controllers, and the Kubelet when triggered by various events. The post also provides practical examples and encourages experimentation using the kubespy repository and outlines the effects of modifying Pod labels or deleting Pods. It highlights the potential of the Kubernetes API to provide valuable insights into cluster states and encourages readers to explore these functionalities using tools like kubespy and Pulumi CLI.

Pulumi's introduction of the cloud.HttpServer API allows developers to serve Node.js HTTP servers as serverless APIs across multiple cloud platforms, combining Node.js's robust ecosystem with the operational simplicity of serverless architecture. This API maintains the familiar structure of Node.js applications, enabling developers to easily integrate existing middleware like Express.js while facilitating deployment across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud without needing platform-specific code. By translating cloud-specific inputs and outputs to match Node.js's expectations, Pulumi simplifies the creation of cloud applications, allowing the same codebase to be used across different cloud providers. Currently available for AWS and Azure, with Google Cloud support forthcoming, this feature aims to streamline cloud application development within the Pulumi framework, offering a seamless and unified experience for developers accustomed to Node.js's flexibility.

Pulumi has introduced new features to streamline the process of building cloud applications using familiar languages like TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, and Go across various cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and OpenStack. Users can access a selection of templates via the Pulumi dashboard or CLI to quickly scaffold their apps, with a new feature allowing them to create projects directly from the dashboard by selecting from a matrix of cloud providers and languages. These templates, which can also be customized and submitted as pull requests on GitHub, facilitate the creation of boilerplate stacks like storage buckets. Once a template is chosen, users can initialize their stack using command line instructions provided on the project page, preview it, and deploy it using the relevant cloud setup. Pulumi encourages community engagement through Slack conversations, documentation, and contributions of new templates.