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As enterprise developers increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures, there is a need for a new generation of tools that help developers manage infrastructure the same way they manage code.
That’s an area where startup Pulumi is looking to help, providing an open-source infrastructure-as-code platform that first became available in June. On Oct. 22 the company announced a Team Edition, which provides features for organizations to build and deploy cloud-native infrastructure as code. Alongside the Team Edition launch, Pulumi announced that it has raised $15 million in a Series A round of investment, led by Madrona Venture Group and joined by Tola Capital.
“We’re treating cloud as part and parcel to the architecture of an application; it’s not an afterthought,” Joe Duffy, CEO of Pulumi, told eWEEK.
Duffy helped to co-found Pulumi in 2017, after spending 12 years at Microsoft building and managing developer technologies and tools. He noted that in his experience, DevOps teams are using very different sets of tools for development and operations workflows.
Pulumi has a cloud-native software development kit (SDK), which is an open-source tool and framework that provides multi-language support for different clouds. The Pulumi SDK is what developers use to author and share different components. Pulumi also has a cloud delivery platform that takes code from developer repositories and gets that code into the cloud. The new Team tier of the Pulumi platform enables organizational teams to collaborate on deployment, providing insight into what is running.
Container and microservices deployment technologies including Docker and Kubernetes already have some capabilities for defining how applications should be handled in operations. Among the widely used container tools for defining how multi-container based applications will run is Docker Compose.
“If you like Docker Compose, you’ll really love Pulumi, because it give you even more of a simple expressive approach,” Duffy said. “You get the simplicity of Compose. In fact, the verb is the same. You run Pulumi up, and then it just goes and provisions everything and just makes it work.”
In Kubernetes deployments, Helm charts are often used to define the architecture assets that will be deployed to enable a container application. Duffy said that Pulumi supports deploying Helm charts as part of an infrastructure provisioning process. Helm charts are written in YAML (Yet Another Markup Language), which can be quite verbose for complex configurations.
“We actually took a 1,000-line Helm chart, which was a Jenkins cluster, converted it to Pulumi, and it went from 1,000 lines of YAML to 200 lines of JavaScript,” he said.
Pulumi Enterprise
Looking beyond the Team edition, Duffy said Pulumi is now working on a full enterprise edition. Among the capabilities that will be integrated with Pulumi Enterprise are Role Based Access Control (RBAC), as well as single sign-on support with SAML and Active Directory.
“We’re integrating with Active Directory so that you can use Active Directory groups to manage the role-based access control that Pulumi gives you,” Duffy said. “Pulumi Enterprise also offers some improved compliance and security features.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.