August 2023 Summaries

The AI industry's rapid growth, exemplified by ChatGPT's success, highlights a significant digital transformation, but implementing AI/ML in products faces challenges, particularly in managing cloud infrastructure. The process involves multiple steps like data preparation, model training, and building backend services, with cloud orchestration being the most complex part, often handled manually or with scripts, leading to inefficiencies. Infrastructure as code (IaC) is crucial for overcoming these challenges, offering a structured approach to managing cloud operations. Pulumi, an open-source IaC platform, allows engineers to manage AI infrastructure using familiar programming languages like Python. This blog post introduces a series on AI Infrastructure with Python, beginning with deploying a LLM model for a chatbot using Pulumi, showcasing its benefits in simplifying AI/ML tasks and enhancing development speed. The series aims to demonstrate how Pulumi and Python-based IaC can streamline and democratize AI development, encouraging collaboration within the MLOps community.

Pulumi has released version 6.0 of its AWS provider, which is the most widely used in the Pulumi ecosystem, bringing a range of improvements and new features, including 56 new resources and 23 new functions. This major release incorporates breaking changes, aligns support with both the new Terraform Plugin SDK and the legacy Terraform Plugin Framework, and optimizes the SDK size, reducing it by up to 90% compared to version 5.0. The update also includes fixes for highly requested issues and deprecates older resources in favor of more logically organized versions. The new version ensures better performance, quicker download times, and an enhanced developer experience, with details available in the release notes and migration guide. Pulumi invites users to explore the new features and register for a live workshop on September 7, 2023, to see the AWS 6.0 provider in action.

Pulumi Cloud has introduced a new Admin permission scope for Organization Access Tokens, following the successful adoption of their initial launch last year. These tokens are designed for programmatic access in CI/CD tools and other automated processes, offering a higher level of permissions than the previous member-level tokens. The new Admin tokens enable users to perform advanced actions such as transferring stacks, managing user roles, and accessing audit log events, which were not possible before. This update is particularly beneficial for Enterprise and Business Critical customers and is available during a 14-day trial period. Pulumi invites users to provide feedback on this feature through the Pulumi Cloud Requests repository.

Matt Stephenson, a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Starburst Data, discussed how the company leveraged Pulumi to enhance its cloud infrastructure management during a presentation at PulumiUP 2023. Starburst, which operates a data lake analytics platform powered by Trino, faced challenges with manual scaling and potential service disruptions due to frequent infrastructure updates across its multi-cloud Kubernetes clusters. By adopting Pulumi and its Automation API, Starburst unified its software development and infrastructure management, significantly improving deployment speeds and reliability. Pulumi's support for Java and TypeScript allowed Starburst's engineers to write infrastructure code using familiar languages, fostering a cohesive development environment. The integration led to a threefold increase in deployment speed, enabling blue-green deployments with no customer downtime and streamlining CI/CD processes through a consistent deployment lifecycle using GitHub Actions. This approach also consolidated the management of over 50 Kubernetes clusters and various SaaS platforms under a single tool, enhancing efficiency and reducing complexity.

Pulumi has launched a new Migration Hub aimed at easing the transition to its infrastructure as code platform, regardless of the user's starting point, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or manually provisioned resources. The platform offers tools for self-serve migration and an Expert Services group to assist with more complex transitions, emphasizing productivity, scalability, and security. Pulumi is chosen by many, including Atlassian, Mercedes-Benz, and Snowflake, for its capacity to boost developer velocity and manage complex cloud infrastructures. The company also provides special offers for startups and open-source projects to minimize adoption costs. Pulumi's commitment to open source is reinforced by its Apache 2.0 licensing, and it continues to expand its partner program to enhance market adoption.

Pulumi reaffirms its commitment to the open-source community, stating that it remains unaffected by HashiCorp's recent relicensing of their software and extends support to those impacted by the change. Pulumi emphasizes its dedication to true open source by using the Apache 2.0 license and assures that it does not, and will not, rely on BSL-licensed software from HashiCorp or any other source. The company looks forward to continuing its service to both new and loyal customers, with open source and its rapidly expanding community at the forefront of its operations.

Pulumi has announced the general availability of its Cloud Resource Search AI Assist feature, which allows users to search their Pulumi organization using natural language queries in multiple languages. Initially launched in a private beta in April, this feature is now accessible to all Pulumi Cloud customers across various editions. Enhancements have been made to make the functionality more user-friendly and discoverable, including a search bar toggle, suggested queries, and an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that generates random queries for users. These updates aim to simplify the process of gaining insights into infrastructure by enabling queries without needing specific syntax or token knowledge. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on the feature through the Pulumi Cloud Requests repository.

Washington Trust Bank, a longstanding financial institution, sought to modernize its software development and infrastructure by adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to enhance security, reliability, and agility in its cloud operations. The bank, transitioning from on-premise systems to Azure, faced challenges in managing its rapidly growing infrastructure while adhering to strict security protocols. Choosing Pulumi over other IaC options like Terraform and Azure Bicep, the bank benefited from Pulumi's versatility, TypeScript support, and seamless integration with GitHub and Azure CLI. Pulumi's automation capabilities allowed Washington Trust Bank to streamline its infrastructure management, improve development speed, and implement security best practices through reusable infrastructure packages and CI/CD pipelines. Additionally, tools like Pulumi CrossGuard and Policy Packs provided robust safeguards, preventing unauthorized or insecure resource deployments and enhancing the overall security of the bank's cloud infrastructure. This modernization effort not only increased developer productivity but also ensured rapid value delivery to customers, aligning with the bank's strategic objectives.