Infrastructure as code, or IaC, has changed the way engineers think about cloud infrastructure management. As infrastructure sprawls at large companies, innovative tools are simplifying IaC.
Pulumi, for instance, has made a splash recently with recognition from the analysts at Enterprise Management Associates and a growing stable of engineering teams opting to use the platform.
What makes Pulumi so easy to use? Several factors are responsible, but overall, engineers’ preference for Pulumi shows that any tool which offers powerful ways to safely simplify workflows will always have demand.
Here are three reasons why growing numbers of engineers prefer Pulumi to manage their infrastructure.
Ease of Use
Popular IaC tools tend to use native languages or languages derived from popular ones. This has always caused sticking points for developers, since the learning curve is steep. Pulumi solves this issue by supporting several popular programming languages.
Developers can therefore tie IaC closely to ordinary development workflows, reducing the amount of mental switching they need to do. Thanks to shorter learning curves, developers can get up to speed quickly too, reducing ramp-up times.
Cohesion is a side-effect of all this. Development and IaC blend closely, leading to fewer deployment errors. Compare all this to the use of declarative hash language (HCL) in Terraform, and the benefits are easy to see.
Error checking is also simple, since developers don’t have to switch languages. Pulumi also does a great job of building modularity into its functions, giving developers plenty of choices in the language of their choice.
The Pulumi service for state management is the default, giving developers a handy resource to refer to asset states and changes. All these features mean Pulumi is easy to use and offers developers quick snapshots of cloud service statuses on demand.
Stronger Security
Error handling is a critical function during deployment and is a common security bottleneck in most IaC tools. Pulumi captures the type checking features of each language it supports, preventing errors during deployment. Strong type checking of this kind thus secures infrastructure like few other IaC tools can.
Secrets management is also simple with Pulumi. The platform has built-in support for sensitive data handling. It offers encryption and decryption automatically and offers developers an easy way to work with handling secrets.
While a lot of Pulumi’s functionality makes sense for development teams, its managed service for state management has led to a few complaints. However, it is important to note that this service is a trade-off, as managed services can help teams scale easily.
The drawback is that this choice makes it tough to work within a closed environment, hampering security. Despite this, teams can implement workarounds. Given the scaling benefits it offers, a managed service for state management isn’t as big of a drawback as it might initially seem.
Great Customization
Pulumi’s SDK library, with over 75 providers, is a huge draw for most developers. All SDKs are available in the platforms’ supported languages, giving developers endless ways to customize Pulumi to their needs.
In addition, Pulumi’s features aid customization in ways unlike other IaC resources. For instance, ComponentResources, a feature within Pulumi, encapsulates child resources. Developers can create a class that represents several related resources as a single unit.
This feature comes in handy if a developer wants to set up an S3 bucket with secondary region replication. One component can receive a single bucket name but creates two buckets behind the scenes.
StackReferences is another example of the kind of customization Pulumi offers. Developers often find the need to create multiple stacks within a stack to process upstream stack output. Pulumi’s feature makes this task easy.
Pulumi also runs as an app on user machines and in CI/CD pipelines. The platform’s automation API helps developers involve CLI operations, taking custom deployment scenarios to another level.
An Emerging Leader
Pulumi is in a highly competitive landscape with developers having several options. While platforms like Terraform are still extremely popular, Pulumi’s advantages make it many developers’ primary choice. Best of all, Pulumi simplifies the learning curve associated with IaC.
The platform’s libraries and ability to run in the developer’s language of choice shorten the learning curve, helping developers ramp up quickly. As a company’s cloud infrastructure needs evolve, Pulumi scales seamlessly with it, making it a no-brainer.
