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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

#32
post #14

What is an open-source cloud development platform? I've read the first 5 paragraphs of the blog post and skimmed through the landing page, I've also clicked on the "38 lines of code" example, and I still don't understand where does this fits. I imagined it was something like Heroku, but I guess I was wrong. I'll keep trying to understand it, anyway.

(I'm a product manager at Pulumi.)

Pulumi lets you describe cloud resources using code instead of a config language. It's not like Heroku, it's more like a deployment tool (e.g. Serverless Framework, Terraform, Claudia.js, Chalice, etc).

The difference compared to other deployment tools is that you use regular code, but it's turned into a declarative plan when you run `pulumi update`. So, you get the benefits of a regular programming language, while still following best practices of immutable infrastructure.

Does that help?

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

#34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several years ago, my employer created a similar tool with this exact same "feature". What we've found is that while standing up entire stacks in non-prod is kinda cool at first, it's a real drag at scale. We've had to walk back that feature with some hackish workarounds. We've also found that all the API calls necessary to determine what needs to be created can result in us being throttled by Amazon (the dread "Rate…

Could you provide some more detail on what made it a drag? Was it just the Amazon API issues? Cost? Security? Governance? Your experiences here seem like they could be valuable to other folks in the same situation.

[deleted]

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

#36
Hmm, I was excited to see a former Midori developer working on a "cloud development platform". And I was even more excited to read:

>Using Pulumi, you author cloud programs using your favorite language, spanning low-level infrastructure-as-code to highly productive and modern container- and serverless-powered applications.

I'm enthusiastic about the prospect of using a real programming language to deploy and control a distributed system. It would be fantastic to have a library that gives me a nice, clean API for performing low-level distributed system tasks, manipulating and controlling hosts at the level of individual processes and sockets.

But I was disappointed to see that Pulumi doesn't seem to be designed to support deployment onto bare metal. In fact it seems to be just another layer of abstraction over various SaaS providers, or a huge dependency like Kubernetes. Why add another layer?

Today's systems are already heavily abstracted. For me, the value of using a really expressive programming language to implement a system, is that you can keep more of the abstraction in the language, and thereby avoid complexity in the underlying architecture.

To me, it is not very interesting to layer yet another library on top of the Kubernetes API. I'd be much more interested to see an attempt to replace the Kubernetes API with a library. This seems to be the former, and not oriented towards the latter, which is a bit of a disappointment.

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

#37
post #14

What is an open-source cloud development platform? I've read the first 5 paragraphs of the blog post and skimmed through the landing page, I've also clicked on the "38 lines of code" example, and I still don't understand where does this fits. I imagined it was something like Heroku, but I guess I was wrong. I'll keep trying to understand it, anyway.

(I'm a product manager at Pulumi.) Pulumi lets you describe cloud resources using code instead of a config language. It's not like Heroku, it's more like a deployment tool (e.g. Serverless Framework, Terraform, Claudia.js, Chalice, etc). The difference compared to other deployment tools is that you use regular code, but it's turned into a declarative plan when you run `pulumi update`. So, you get the benefits of a re…

Then is this something like NixOps [1]? Or how does it differ?

[1] https://nixos.org/nixops/

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

#38
post #24

When I read a blog about "cloud development platform", I expect to understand how it fairs vs. Terraform. I'm already using Terraform. All the cloud "consultants" I know of, use Terraform. In order to not use it, I need a reason - I need something that Pulumi can do, and Terraform can't.

(I'm a product manager on Pulumi.) If Terraform works for you, then definitely continue using it. Pulumi is just another option and works well for building libraries and components. I did a rundown of different tools for serverless apps at Velocity SF last week. Slides are here: https://cdn.oreillystatic.com/en/assets/1/event/270/Tooling%... and GitHub samples are here: https://github.com/lindydonna/velocity-examples…

Hi, thank you for the slides and repo - lots of good material there. Just in case I've failed to clarify my intention: I'd really like to know the upsides of "Pulumi". I'm sure it was built for a reason (i.e dissatisfaction wrt other tools). I just don't have the bandwidth to blindly invest myself in tech without some promise that something will end for the better for me or my company. Thanks!

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

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense. That makes it sound like Pulumi only runs the infrastructure declarations when you run "pulumi update", and that those things don't run when your program runs. That's confusing to me, because your examples (like the thumbnailer) seems to have the program and the declarations in the same file. Is Pulumi stateful, then? If you create resources with "pulumi update", change the declarations without updating,…

(I'm a product manager at Pulumi.) > That makes it sound like Pulumi only runs the infrastructure declarations when you run "pulumi update", and that those things don't run when your program runs. That's confusing to me, because your examples (like the thumbnailer) seems to have the program and the declarations in the same file. This is an optional way to do it, by combining the runtime code and infra code. The runti…

Is there an option for self-hosting your state files vs relying on pulumi.com?

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

#40
Looks very interesting. I have a couple of questions:

1. One of my pet peeves with CloudFormation is the disconnect between the state of CF and the "actual" state if someone decides to update resources by not using CF. Does Pulumi do checks to verify that the actual state matches its assumed state?

2. Is there a guide for contributing a new language and/or provider?

Also, I tried getting an invite for the Pulumi Slack community and was greeted with "invite_limit_reached".

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