Just over a month ago we publicly launched Pulumi, a new cloud native development platform. The response has been overwhelming and we’ve been hard at work responding to your feedback ever since.

Today, we are excited to release Pulumi 0.15 and make it available to download. This release includes improvements across the entire Pulumi development experience. Pulumi supports more platforms (Kubernetes and OpenStack), is faster (Parallelism, simpler (native TypeScript support), richer (serverless frameworks for Azure and GCP), and is more deeply integrated into the application lifecycle (GitHub App for CI/CD integration).

In this post, we’ll take a quick tour of these new features. Stay tuned for follow up blog posts to dive deeper into individual topics.

Kubernetes

Pulumi can now deploy and manage Kubernetes resources using the same familiar programming model supported for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It’s also possible to mix resources from multiple clouds in the same program, such as using an S3 Bucket or RDS database from your Kubernetes-managed containers.

This release includes dozens of features that make it simple and productive to create and manage Kubernetes applications and resources and to perform production-grade deployments. The @pulumi/kubernetes package provides access to the full Kubernetes API, ensuring you can deploy any Kubernetes application with Pulumi.

New support for new helm.v2.Chart(...) allows deploying existing Helm charts via Pulumi, ensuring you can coordinate deployment of charts as part of a larger Pulumi deployment.

Complex Kubernetes resources (like Deployments and Services) also provide rich status updates so that you have complete visibility into the state of a deployment while it is in progress, including incremental progress reporting, and significant work was put into making it easy to diagnose and robustly recover from deployment failures.

The Pulumi Kubernetes provider can be used to deploy to any Kubernetes cluster, whether cloud hosted (EKS, AKS, GKE) or local (Minikube, Docker for Mac) or on-premise. And because Pulumi is already great at deploying cloud resources, the Pulumi Kubernetes provider can be combined with, for example, the Pulumi Azure provider to deploy and manage both the cluster and Kubernetes resources that should be installed into the cluster.

import * as azure from "@pulumi/azure" ; import * as k8s from "@pulumi/kubernetes" ; import * as helm from "@pulumi/kubernetes/helm" ; // Create an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster const resourceGroup = new azure . core . ResourceGroup ( "aks" , { location : "West US" }); const kubernetesService = new azure . containerservice . KubernetesCluster ( "kubernetes" , { /* ... */ }); // Create a Pulumi Kubernetes provider configured to deploy to the AKS cluster above export const azk8s = new k8s . Provider ( "azk8s" , { kubeconfig : kubernetesService.kubeConfigRaw , }); // Deploy a Helm chart into the cluster const kibana = new helm . v2 . Chart ( "kibana" , { repo : "stable" , chart : "kibana" , version : "0.8.0" , values : { service : { type : "LoadBalancer" } }, }, { providers : { kubernetes : azk8s } });

Check out the Kubernetes overview docs, the API documentation and the pulumi-kubernetes GitHub project for additional details.

Parallelism

Pulumi now runs deployments in parallel by default. To accomplish this, the Pulumi engine tracks all dependencies across cloud resources in your program, maximizing the amount of work that can proceed in parallel, while also ensuring all resource are created, updated, replaced, or destroyed in the correct order.

In some extreme cases, this new parallelism support can improve performance by 2-10x, but even more importantly, parallelism provides a performance boost for practically every Pulumi deployment.

First Class Providers

Pulumi programs can now create multiple instances of a resource provider, and can initialize an instance of a resources provider using outputs of other resources.

For example, a Pulumi program can now deploy resources into multiple AWS regions by creating providers targeting each region. This can be used for resources that must be deployed in a certain region (e.g. Lambda@Edge or ACM certificates), or just for managing multi-region deployments from a single Pulumi program.

This also enables scenarios where a Pulumi program deploys some base infrastructure, and then wants to manage resources deployed on top of that using a different provider. For example, deploy a GKE cluster, and then configure a Kubernetes provider to deploy Kubernetes resources on top of the cluster. Or even then deploy OpenFaaS into the Kubernetes cluster, and use the Pulumi OpenFaaS provider to deploy functions.

You might have already noticed, however we already used this feature in the Kubernetes example earlier!

Native TypeScript Support

Pulumi has supported JavaScript since inception, and as a result, it’s been possible to use Pulumi via TypeScript to get the benefits of earlier error checking and richer tooling for cloud infrastructure and application development. However, TypeScript code had to previously be manually compiled to JavaScript prior to doing a Pulumi deployment, which added some friction for users who wanted to use TypeScript with Pulumi.

In this release, Pulumi now natively supports TypeScript, so you do not need to run tsc explicitly before deploying. (We often forget to do this too!) Simply run pulumi up , and the program will be recompiled on the fly before running it.

New templates are now available via pulumi new which use the new, simpler, TypeScript support.

Using Imports from Runtime Functions

Pulumi supports creating cloud functions (Lambdas, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions) using JavaScript callbacks in your Pulumi application. This provides a nice and simple way to write the little pieces of code that you need to integrate into your cloud application and version with your infrastructure using real functions.

We heard feedback from early adopters who wanted to be able to import NPM packages in their Pulumi program more easily, and then use them within one of these cloud functions. We’ve enabled this now, so that the common way of structuring code works as expected, and so that writing idiomatic JavaScript or TypeScript “just works.”

For example, the code below uses the axios NPM package to make an HTTP request inside an AWS Lambda invoked by an AWS API Gateway (in just a few lines of code!).

import * as axios from "axios" ; import * as cloud from "@pulumi/cloud-aws" ; const api = new cloud . API ( "api" ); api . get ( "/" , async ( req , res ) => { const statusText = ( await axios . default . get ( "https://www.pulumi.com" )). statusText ; res . write ( `GET https://www.pulumi.com/ == ${ statusText } ` ). end (); }); export const url = api . publish (). url ;

OpenStack

Thanks to a contribution by Fraser Waters (@Frassle), Pulumi now also supports OpenStack. This allows users targeting an OpenStack API from their public or private cloud provider to use Pulumi to author and manage infrastructure deployments.

For example, a VM can be deployed to OVH with just the following:

const os = require ( "@pulumi/openstack" ); const instance = new os . compute . Instance ( "test" , { flavorName : "s1-2" , imageName : "Ubuntu 16.04" , }); exports . instanceIP = instance . accessIpV4 ;

Check out the API documentation and the pulumi-openstack GitHub project for additional details. Huge thanks to Fraser for his work on this!

Serverless Functions in GCP and Azure

Particularly with serverless functions being real functions, we had a lot of interest in broadening our existing support beyond just AWS serverless. We are happy to announce better serverless functionality for GCP and Azure.

On Azure, the new @pulumi/azure-serverless package makes it easy to work with serverless functions, and has initial support for hooking up to Blob storage event sources:

import * as azure from "@pulumi/azure" ; import * as serverless from "@pulumi/azure-serverless" ; const storageAccount = new azure . storage . Account ( "images-container" , { /* ... */ }); serverless . storage . onBlobEvent ( "newImage" , storageAccount , ( context , blob ) => { context . log ( context ); context . log ( blob ); context . done (); }, { containerName : "folder" , filterSuffix : ".png" }); export let storageAccountName = storageAccount . name ;

On Google Cloud, the new gcp.serverless.Function provides an easy way to create a Google Cloud Function from a JavaScript callback in a Pulumi program. Thanks to Mikhail Shilkov (@mikhailshilkov) for contributing this feature!

import * as gcp from "@pulumi/gcp" ; let f = new gcp . serverless . Function ( "f" , {}, ( req , res ) => { res . send ( `Hello ${ req . body . name || 'World' } !` ); }); export let url = f . function . httpsTriggerUrl ;

GitHub App for CI/CD Integration

Pulumi already works with your favorite CI/CD systems to accomplish automated and continuous deployments of cloud infrastructure and applications. This is how Pulumi deploys and manages our own infrastructure that runs , and is how our most engaged users adopt Pulumi in their own teams.

Our mission is to make Pulumi the easiest way to get code to the cloud. To that end, we are launching a new Pulumi GitHub App which bridges the gap between GitHub (source code, pull requests) and Pulumi (cloud resources, stack updates). By installing the Pulumi GitHub App into your GitHub organization , and then running Pulumi as part of your existing CI/CD process, you will receive integrated stack updates and previews in your pull requests. This allows you to see the potential impact a change would have on your cloud infrastructure before merging the code, and collaborate with your teammates when deploying application and infrastructure changes.

The Pulumi GitHub App is still in preview as we work to support more CI systems and extend its capabilities. For information on how to install it and configure it with your CI system, please read the documentation.

Summary

We’re excited about all the new features in this release and the new scenarios they enable for the Pulumi community . If you are new to Pulumi, download the tools and get started today, or join us in Slack. A big thanks to all the users and contributors who have helped shape this release – we can’t wait to see what you build next !

Special Thanks