November 2019 Summaries

Pulumi's participation at KubeCon in San Diego featured the release of two technology previews: Pulumi Crosswalk for Kubernetes and Pulumi Query for Kubernetes. Crosswalk offers a set of playbooks with common patterns to simplify Kubernetes API syntax by providing trusted defaults, while Query enhances observability by allowing resource process exposure via batch or streaming queries. Sara Novotny, in a keynote with Liz Fong-Jones, emphasized observability as a system's ability to provide insights. Pulumi engineers Erin Krengel and Sean Holung presented on using ephemeral environments for automated testing, highlighting their utility in mimicking production settings. The CNCF facilitated the rapid availability of presentation videos, allowing broader access to the insights shared at the event. Pulumi expressed enthusiasm for future participation at KubeCon 2020.

Pulumi's Crosswalk for Kubernetes is a collection of playbooks and libraries designed to simplify the configuration, deployment, and management of Kubernetes in production environments. As Kubernetes becomes the standard platform for containerized applications, its complexity poses significant challenges, often leading to misconfigurations and production outages. Crosswalk for Kubernetes aims to address these challenges by offering structured guidance on identity management, managed infrastructure, cluster configuration, and application services, leveraging managed services from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The approach is organized into six distinct playbooks that address various aspects of Kubernetes deployment, from establishing secure identities and roles to configuring networking and storage infrastructure and deploying applications with continuous integration and delivery systems. By utilizing infrastructure as code, Crosswalk for Kubernetes reduces boilerplate code and enhances productivity, making Kubernetes more accessible to teams with varying levels of expertise. The guide provides comprehensive examples and instructions, supporting a wide range of cloud providers and encouraging the adoption of best practices in Kubernetes management.

Pulumi Query for Kubernetes is a tool and SDK designed to simplify the process of querying live Kubernetes resources, allowing users to answer complex questions about their clusters without manually parsing multiple command outputs. It supports both batch and streaming query modes; batch queries generate fixed reports, while streaming queries monitor resources in real-time, triggering actions based on specific events. For instance, batch queries can determine the distinct MySQL versions running in a cluster, while streaming queries can alert users to deployment changes. The tool uses core primitives like "list" for batch queries and "watch" for streaming, with advanced operations possible through methods like "join" and "groupJoin." By offering these capabilities, Pulumi Query aims to enhance observability, facilitate automation, and improve governance and security within Kubernetes environments, potentially leading to easier cluster operations by reducing the need for manual scripting.

Pulumi has launched Crosswalk for Kubernetes, a suite of open-source tools, libraries, and playbooks designed to streamline the adoption of Kubernetes within organizations by bridging the gap between developers and operators. Over the past year, Pulumi has gained insights from assisting companies in transitioning to Kubernetes for their infrastructure and application workloads, and the release aims to disseminate these learnings to a broader audience. The platform supports managing Kubernetes resources using Pulumi's infrastructure as code tools, allowing for the use of languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python, and supports the entire Kubernetes object model. Pulumi's unified approach facilitates seamless integration of Kubernetes with underlying cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more, simplifying complex provisioning tasks. The Crosswalk initiative specifically addresses challenges in Kubernetes production environments, such as infrastructure management, developer accessibility, and scaling operational delivery. It introduces playbooks for best practices in cluster infrastructure, tools to reduce complexity in Kubernetes configurations, and capabilities for CI/CD integrations to support global scale delivery, all while encouraging community involvement to further evolve the project.

Kubernetes is known for its powerful yet complex API, which often requires users to redundantly specify deeply nested fields across resources, leading to a reliance on copy-pasting code. The Kubernetes Extensions (kx) library for Pulumi aims to simplify this process by abstracting away low-level details and providing a more user-friendly interface for declaring Kubernetes resources. This library mirrors the benefits of high-level programming languages, allowing users to focus on higher-level application concerns while still being able to access the full capabilities of the underlying API when needed. With kx, resource declarations become more concise, and resources can be composed more effortlessly, exemplified by a significant reduction in complexity compared to traditional YAML configurations. Currently available in developer preview, kx invites users to experience its streamlined approach to managing Kubernetes infrastructure.

Pulumi has introduced support for .NET Core in preview, enabling millions of .NET developers to utilize infrastructure as code with C#, F#, and Visual Basic across multiple platforms such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. This development allows users to create and manage cloud resources on major cloud providers, including Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform, without the need for learning JSON or YAML scripting. Pulumi simplifies the deployment of cloud infrastructure by using general-purpose programming languages to declaratively specify resources, with the Pulumi engine handling the orchestration of operations. The integration with .NET enhances developer productivity by allowing the use of familiar IDE features and NuGet libraries, while operators benefit from predictable and reliable deployments through the Pulumi CLI and CI/CD integrations. The article provides a practical example of deploying an application to Azure, showcasing Pulumi's ability to manage resources such as Azure App Services and SQL databases, thus highlighting its potential to streamline building modern, scalable applications.

Pulumi has announced the preview of .NET Core support, allowing developers to create, deploy, and manage infrastructure using .NET languages such as C#, F#, and VB.NET across any cloud platform. This development marks a significant milestone for the Pulumi team, many of whom were instrumental in the early development of the .NET project and its transition to open source, including support for macOS and Linux. The .NET support and its libraries are open source on GitHub, aligning with Pulumi's commitment to open-source development. The preview release aims to gather user feedback to refine the offering, and Pulumi invites developers to participate in discussions on their Community Slack.