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Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

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Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#2
We've had a chance to try out Pulumi when it was in private beta. We are very happy with it so far.

Having used a variety of tools in the space, this is the first time I ever had an engineer say to me: "I really like it, I hope we can keep using it."

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#4

It's a pity they didn't offer .net support from the start. I wonder what were the reasons, besides popularity contest.

> I wonder what were the reasons, besides popularity contest.

(Disclosure: I'm a member of the Pulumi team).

Strictly a timing issue. We brought TypeScript/JavaScript online first and most of our focus was there while building up the supporting tooling. Fortunately, the design of the system makes it pretty easy to add new languages (we've since then done Python and Go). Most of the team is ex-.NET folks and I've been itching to build out the .NET support. Now that we've launched, it will at least become /my/ spare time project.

I'll be really excited when we have it well. Do keep your eye out!

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#5

It's a pity they didn't offer .net support from the start. I wonder what were the reasons, besides popularity contest.

Yep, lacking Java and .NET support makes it a bit un-appealing to me.

On the other hand, it looks quite interesting and is good to finally be able to know what Pulumi is all about.

Looking forward how it evolves.

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#6
> How do we know? We don’t need to

Pulumi looks like clever technology but the complete detachment from the underlying services and associated costs seems like the perfect storm for an extremely expensive disaster.

How does Pulumi keep track of which services are launched, especially during testing/development, and how does it ensure those are shut down once they are no longer needed? How does it determine the optimal size of instances/volumes/etc to launch?

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#7
post #6

> How do we know? We don’t need to Pulumi looks like clever technology but the complete detachment from the underlying services and associated costs seems like the perfect storm for an extremely expensive disaster. How does Pulumi keep track of which services are launched, especially during testing/development, and how does it ensure those are shut down once they are no longer needed? How does it determine the optima…

That detachment certainly has not harmed Terraform (some of the providers for which are used by Pulumi) - so I'm not sure it's as big an issue as you make out?

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#8
post #6

> How do we know? We don’t need to Pulumi looks like clever technology but the complete detachment from the underlying services and associated costs seems like the perfect storm for an extremely expensive disaster. How does Pulumi keep track of which services are launched, especially during testing/development, and how does it ensure those are shut down once they are no longer needed? How does it determine the optima…

Hi! I work at Pulumi and have been using it to standup and manage all of our service infrastructure.

> How does Pulumi keep track of which services are launched, especially during testing/development

Each Pulumi program is ran within the context of "a stack". The stack is essentially a collection of cloud resources. So when the Pulumi program runs, it will create resources that aren't in the stack, or update existing ones.

So if you create any resources during dev/testing, you just need to `pulumi destroy` those stacks and all of the cloud resources will be reclaimed.

This, IMHO, is one of Pulumi's best features. In that it makes it super-easy to create your own instance of a cloud application. For example, I have my own development instance of app.pulumi.com by just creating my own Pulumi stack and rerunning the same application.

> How does it determine the optimal size of instances/volumes/etc to launch?

It doesn't. The Pulumi program ran determines what resources to create. So you are left to configure, tune or tweak that as makes sense.

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#9
post #5

It's a pity they didn't offer .net support from the start. I wonder what were the reasons, besides popularity contest.

Yep, lacking Java and .NET support makes it a bit un-appealing to me. On the other hand, it looks quite interesting and is good to finally be able to know what Pulumi is all about. Looking forward how it evolves.

You'all spoke and we've listened. I've dusted off my old very barebones prototype, pushed it to a branch at https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/tree/ellismg/add-dotnet, and will be hacking on this over the course of the next week. Collaborators are welcome (please do join the #contribute channel in our slack at https://slack.pulumi.io). And watch the branch, I expect we'll have something usable in a few days and it might help folks who are interested in supporting other languages with Pulumi.

In the meantime, as someone who had to learn TypeScript to start using Pulumi when I started here, I do encourage you to look at some of the examples we have and play around with them. It's actually a pretty nice language and with VSCode it's pretty easy to get started.

(Disclosure: I still work at Pulumi)

Re: Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform

#10
post #4

It's a pity they didn't offer .net support from the start. I wonder what were the reasons, besides popularity contest.

> I wonder what were the reasons, besides popularity contest. (Disclosure: I'm a member of the Pulumi team). Strictly a timing issue. We brought TypeScript/JavaScript online first and most of our focus was there while building up the supporting tooling. Fortunately, the design of the system makes it pretty easy to add new languages (we've since then done Python and Go). Most of the team is ex-.NET folks and I've been…

Are you worried that adding "non-hip" languages from the start will alienate the kind of Microsoft-avoiding crowd you as a corporation are trying so hard to win?

Is Pulumi some sort of open-ended research project like Midori?

If I want to offer it to an enterprise client shall I say "don't worry one of their guys might add C#/Java in his spare time if he has a chance"?

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