Pulumi Pursues Polyglotism to Extend Infrastructure-as-Code

Pulumi's Matty Stratton talks about the recently universal Infrastructure-as-Code and that impact on both dev and ops teams.

Jun 22nd, 2022 12:28pm by Jennifer Riggins

Featued image for: Pulumi Pursues Polyglotism to Extend Infrastructure-as-Code

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 developers and operations. 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 last month, Matty Stratton, staff developer advocate at Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools provider Pulumi, talks about how IaC could impact dev and ops teams.

Pulumi Pursues Polyglotism to Expand Impact of DevOps

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, PlayerFM, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn

In 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 can be used to create, deploy and manage 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,” Stratton said.

For Stratton, that means writing infrastructure management 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 environment] and a whole ecosystem,” Stratton said.

“So that makes it a lot more powerful, and gives us a lot of great abstractions we can use.”

Jennifer Riggins is a culture side of tech storyteller, journalist, writer, and event and podcast host, helping to share the stories where culture and technology collide and to translate the impact of the tech we are building. She has been...