July 2021 Summaries

Pulumi's latest release introduces numerous enhancements and bug fixes across its products, including updates to cloud providers, the CLI, and the Pulumi Service. Notably, the Pulumi Kubernetes Operator now supports GitOps workflows, enabling automatic updates of Kubernetes clusters based on Git repository changes. The Azure Native provider has been expanded with 12 new resources, while the Google Native provider preview has improved with features like auto-naming and automatic selection of project and region settings. The Pulumi CLI sees updates in versions 3.7.0 to 3.8.0, including a new feature allowing the selection of backends via the PULUMI_BACKEND_URL variable for the Automation API, and better handling of subtypes in Python. Additionally, a new dashboard feature in the Pulumi Service aims to streamline the onboarding process for new users by guiding them through setting up the Pulumi CLI and deploying their first cloud infrastructure stack.

Cloud engineering integrates standard software engineering practices across development, infrastructure, and compliance teams to enhance service delivery to customers. It encompasses three main components: Build, Deploy, and Manage. The Build phase focuses on creating reusable infrastructure components using cloud resources, enabling organizations to leverage existing tools and programming languages for efficient service creation. The Deploy phase emphasizes the importance of continuous integration and delivery, automating deployment processes to ensure consistent quality and efficiency while reducing human error. The Manage phase highlights the need for visibility, security, and compliance across all resources, treating policies as code and implementing fine-grained access controls to maintain reliability and build confidence. This approach fosters increased collaboration, trust, and control over the complexities of modern cloud environments, with future discussions planned to delve deeper into specific practices and tools within these areas.

The article explores the application of software testing methodologies to cloud engineering, emphasizing testing regimes like the pyramid, trophy, and honeycomb models suited for distributed and cloud architectures. It details unit, property, and integration tests, highlighting their importance in cloud environments due to complex dependencies between components that can lead to high latency. The use of Pulumi's resource graph to visualize dependencies and the implementation of mocks for efficient unit testing are discussed, with examples such as testing an EC2 instance and a SecurityGroup policy. Integration testing is demonstrated through the deployment of resources in a test environment via Pulumi's Automation API, showcasing the flexibility of infrastructure as code by utilizing Python's unittest framework and Amazon's boto3 library. The article concludes by emphasizing the efficiency of automated testing in distributed infrastructures using familiar tools and frameworks, and it encourages exploring further through Pulumi's Testing User Guide and examples.

Kubernetes, a widely-used container orchestration tool, has traditionally been the domain of operations teams, but developers can also benefit from understanding its functionality to break down team silos. The tutorial introduces Kubernetes by explaining the anatomy of a cluster, which consists of a master node and worker nodes that house containers, and demonstrates how Kubernetes manages these components. Through practical examples, it guides users on deploying applications using YAML files and kubectl, as well as infrastructure as code tools like Pulumi, which allow developers to define infrastructure in familiar programming languages like Python, reducing reliance on YAML. The tutorial highlights the importance of developers understanding Kubernetes to facilitate better collaboration with operations teams and improve the efficiency of deployment processes.

Pulumi has introduced a range of updates and features across its platforms, including support for new and updated cloud providers such as Confluent Cloud, which allows users to manage cloud-native Apache Kafka services using infrastructure-as-code. The GitHub Actions guide now includes comprehensive documentation for projects across all Pulumi languages, enhancing accessibility for developers. Kubernetes users can benefit from a new skipAwait option for Helm charts and YAML components, allowing for faster deployments by disabling await logic. Pulumi's Azure Native provider now includes 10 new resources, while the Google Native provider has added support for enums, improving usability. Enhancements in Pulumi CLI and core technologies include the replaceOnChanges resource option for forcing resource replacement and a --path option for the pulumi watch command to reduce duplicate updates. Python performance has been optimized by minimizing unnecessary logging and checks. Additionally, Pulumi has unveiled a new usage-based pricing model for its Team Edition, offering a scalable solution for teams to collaborate on cloud infrastructure projects with a free tier to facilitate initial adoption.