Pulumi Pursues Polyglotism to Expand Impact of DevOps

VALENCIA – The goal of DevOps was to break down silos between software development and operations. The side effect has become the blurring of lines between dev and ops. For better or for worse. Because the role of software developer is just continuously expanding causing cognitive overload and burnout. This is why the developer tooling market has exploded to automate and assist developers right when and where they need to build, in whatever language they already know.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, recorded on the floor of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, Matty Stratton, staff developer advocate at Pulumi, talks about this recently universal Infrastructure-as-Code and that impact on both dev and ops teams.

Earlier this May, Pulumi released updates that took the platform closer to becoming a truly polyglot way to enforce best cloud practices, including support for:

• Full Java ecosystem
• YAML
• Crosswalk for Amazon Web Services (AWS) in all Pulumi languages
• Deploying AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) in all Pulumi languages

These are significant updates because they dramatically expand the languages that are available in this low-code way of creating, deploying and managing infrastructure on any cloud.

"A lot of times, in Infrastructure-as-Code, we're using domain-specific language using a config file. We call it Infrastructure as Code and are not actually writing any code. So I like to think about Pulumi as Infrastructure as Software." For Stratton, that means writing Pulumi code using a general purpose programming language, like TypeScript, Python, Go, .NET languages, or now Java. "The great thing about that is, not only do you maybe already know this programming language, because that's the language you use to build your applications, but you're able to use all the things that a programming language has available to it, like conditionals, and loops, and packages, and testing tools, and an IDE [integrated development enviornment] and a whole ecosystem. So that makes it a lot more powerful, and gives us a lot of great abstractions we can use," he continued.

Pulumi now follows the low-code development trend where, Stratton says, "We're enabling people to solve a problem with just enough tech." But specifically in their common coding language, to limit the tool onboarding needed.

This is not only attractive to new customers but specifically to expand Pulumi adoption across organizations, without much adaptation of the way they work. Just making it easier to work together.

"I've been part of the DevOps community for a long time. And all that I want to see out of DevOps and all of this work is how do we collaborate better together? How do we be more cross functional?"