¶ Pulumi
¶ Dev Ops
¶ Introduction to Pulumi: A Developer-Friendly Approach to Managing Modern Infrastructure
In the fast-evolving world of DevOps, tools often come and go, but every once in a while, something arrives that genuinely shifts the way teams think about automation, infrastructure, and delivery. Pulumi is one of those tools. It didn’t show up as another variation of what already existed. Instead, it brought a fresh perspective—one that blends software development practices with infrastructure engineering more seamlessly than ever before.
At its core, Pulumi is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform. But reducing it to that simple description doesn’t do it justice. Many tools can declare infrastructure, provision resources, and help teams automate deployments. What makes Pulumi compelling is how it approaches these tasks. Rather than relying on domain-specific languages or complex templates, Pulumi allows you to use real programming languages to define, deploy, and manage infrastructure. This single design choice creates a ripple effect that changes everything from how teams collaborate to how systems evolve over time.
To appreciate Pulumi, it helps to understand the challenges that paved the way for its creation. As cloud architectures have grown more sophisticated—spanning microservices, serverless platforms, distributed data systems, and hybrid environments—managing infrastructure through static configuration files has started to feel increasingly limiting. YAML files and DSL templates work well for simpler setups, but once you start modeling complex environments with loops, conditional logic, reuse, or dynamic dependencies, those tools reveal their constraints.
Pulumi was built to break through those walls. By letting engineers express infrastructure using languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, and C#, Pulumi blurs the boundary between application code and infrastructure code. Instead of learning a new syntax or working around the limitations of templates, developers can bring the full power of familiar programming languages into their IaC workflows. This means functions, conditionals, abstractions, object modeling, testing, dependency management, version control, and CI/CD all feel natural—not bolted on.
This developer-centric approach is one of the reasons Pulumi has gathered so much attention in modern DevOps circles. It invites developers into the world of infrastructure without forcing them to adopt entirely new paradigms. Instead, they use tools they already know—IDEs with autocompletion, linters, testing frameworks, package managers, and libraries—and apply them to cloud infrastructure. This lowers barriers, encourages experimentation, and shortens feedback loops.
Pulumi’s philosophy aligns well with the way cloud infrastructure has evolved. Today’s cloud isn’t just a collection of compute instances and networks. It’s a rich ecosystem of managed services—databases, event buses, streaming platforms, authentication systems, Kubernetes clusters, serverless functions, container registries, and more. These services interact in complex ways and change frequently as cloud providers roll out new capabilities. Managing this complexity benefits enormously from the precision and expressiveness of real programming languages.
What Pulumi offers is not just code-driven infrastructure but infrastructure that can be modeled intelligently. Imagine writing logic that creates resources only when certain conditions are met, generates dynamic names, integrates with APIs during provisioning, transforms configuration values, or automatically enforces patterns like tagging or security guards. These tasks often require workarounds in more rigid IaC tools, but in Pulumi they become first-class capabilities.
As Pulumi gained momentum, it became clear that its strength lies not just in expressiveness but also in its inclusiveness. Teams are no longer constrained to a single workflow. Developers can work in languages they prefer, cloud engineers can focus on architecture, and DevOps practitioners can design automation pipelines that bridge both worlds. This shared environment helps unify teams that traditionally operated in silos.
Pulumi’s integration with major cloud providers—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, and many others—makes it a practical choice for teams working in diverse environments. Whether you’re provisioning a VPC, deploying a Kubernetes cluster, configuring IAM roles, or building a serverless application, Pulumi gives you the tools to orchestrate everything in a consistent manner. More importantly, it does this while preserving the native capabilities of each platform. It doesn’t impose its own abstraction. Instead, it wraps the provider’s APIs in a developer-friendly interface while remaining true to the underlying cloud concepts.
Many people come to Pulumi expecting it to be simply a more flexible alternative to tools like Terraform. But once they spend time with it, they realize that flexibility is just the starting point. Pulumi brings a different way of thinking. It encourages infrastructure that evolves as cleanly as application code. It fosters reusable patterns, modular architecture, and versionable components. It makes infrastructure feel more like software—something to be designed thoughtfully, maintained collaboratively, and improved continuously.
The concept of “Infrastructure as Software” is central to Pulumi’s identity. It implies more than the ability to express infrastructure in code—it means infrastructure can be tested, refactored, reviewed, and packaged just like any other software artifact. Teams that adopt Pulumi often develop internal libraries that codify best practices. For example, a team might build an internal library that provisions a secure S3 bucket with all the required policies and settings baked in. Instead of copying templates from repo to repo, they import and reuse their custom modules across projects.
Pulumi also shines when it comes to automation. Because the code is just code, it integrates naturally into CI/CD pipelines. You can run Pulumi previews on pull requests to show reviewers exactly what infrastructure changes will occur before merging. You can embed deployment logic directly into automation workflows. You can enforce policies that validate code and prevent dangerous actions like deploying into production without proper checks. These capabilities give teams more confidence and reduce risk in environments where infrastructure changes can have major consequences.
One of the most transformative aspects of Pulumi is how it treats state. Like many IaC tools, Pulumi maintains a state file that tracks the resources it manages. But Pulumi expands on this with the Pulumi Service, which provides a managed state backend, history tracking, diffs, audit logs, and collaborative tools. It’s not just a place to store state—it’s a platform for understanding and governing infrastructure evolution. For organizations managing multiple environments or complex deployments, this visibility becomes invaluable.
Another area where Pulumi stands out is its approach to multi-cloud and hybrid workflows. Because Pulumi is not tied to a single cloud provider and because it uses real programming languages, it’s possible to define infrastructure that spans clouds or sits across cloud and on-prem environments. You can write logic that provisions an AWS Lambda function, a Google Cloud Pub/Sub topic, and an Azure storage account all in the same program. This capability is becoming more relevant as organizations diversify their cloud strategies or migrate workloads over time.
Pulumi also supports Kubernetes extremely well. For teams heavily invested in Kubernetes, Pulumi can manage cluster resources alongside cloud infrastructure. This unifies the management of both layers into a single system, reducing fragmentation. You can define deployments, config maps, secrets, service accounts, and Helm charts using the same programming model that provisions your clusters, networks, and managed services. This end-to-end cohesion is something many DevOps teams find appealing, especially if they’re aiming for GitOps-driven workflows.
As cloud-native ecosystems grow, so does the need for tools that enable clarity, reusability, and maintainability. Pulumi encourages these best practices by design. Because infrastructure is expressed as code, version control becomes central. Teams can track changes, review infrastructure updates, roll back versions, and collaborate safely. These practices not only reduce risk but also foster a higher level of engineering maturity.
Throughout this course, you’ll explore Pulumi from many angles. You’ll understand how it models resources, how it handles dependencies, how to structure projects for long-term maintainability, and how to integrate deployments into larger DevOps systems. You’ll experiment with different languages, cloud providers, and patterns. You’ll explore advanced concepts like configuration management, secrets handling, policy-as-code, reusable components, scaling strategies, and multi-environment deployments.
The deeper you go, the more you'll appreciate how Pulumi reshapes the usual patterns of infrastructure engineering. It helps simplify tasks that once felt rigid or repetitive. It makes infrastructure changes easier to reason about. And it encourages an approach where infrastructure evolves with the same agility and discipline as application code.
By the time you complete the 100-article series, Pulumi will feel less like a tool and more like an environment—a place where application logic and cloud architecture coexist naturally. You’ll understand how Pulumi fits into modern DevOps practices, how it empowers collaborative teams, and how it helps organizations build reliable, scalable, secure systems grounded in the principles of cloud-native engineering.
Pulumi doesn’t ask you to abandon what you know—it invites you to extend it. It helps you bring your coding expertise into the infrastructure world, where it can have an enormous impact. It offers a path toward greater clarity, stronger automation, and more elegant cloud design.
Welcome to Pulumi—a modern way to build and manage infrastructure that brings the best of software engineering into the heart of DevOps.
¶ Pulumi
¶ Beginner Level
1. Introduction to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps
2. What is Pulumi? An Overview of Its Capabilities
3. Getting Started with Pulumi: Installation and Setup
4. Understanding the Basics of Pulumi: Projects and Stacks
5. Creating Your First Infrastructure with Pulumi
6. How Pulumi Works: Concepts and Architecture
7. Writing Your First Pulumi Program in TypeScript
8. Using Pulumi with Different Cloud Providers: AWS, Azure, GCP
9. Deploying a Simple EC2 Instance Using Pulumi
10. Understanding Pulumi Stacks and Environments
11. Introduction to Pulumi's CLI: Commands and Workflow
12. Working with Pulumi in a Team: Using Git and Version Control
13. Using Pulumi with Infrastructure Templates and Blueprints
14. Pulumi and Cloud Resources: A Primer on Infrastructure Types
15. Defining Resources and Managing Configurations in Pulumi
16. Integrating Pulumi with Your CI/CD Pipeline
17. Using Pulumi to Automate Provisioning and Configuration
18. Understanding Pulumi’s State Management
19. Exploring Pulumi’s Output Values and Dependencies
20. Basic Networking with Pulumi: Setting up VPCs and Subnets
21. Working with AWS S3 Buckets and IAM Roles Using Pulumi
22. Understanding and Using Pulumi Configuration Files
23. Pulumi’s Multi-language Support: Working with Python, Go, C#, and Node.js
24. Deploying Databases with Pulumi: Amazon RDS and Azure SQL
25. Running Your First Pulumi Deployment: Preview, Update, and Destroy
26. Managing Resource Dependencies in Pulumi
27. Pulumi CloudFormation vs. Terraform: Understanding the Differences
28. Best Practices for Managing Pulumi Projects and Stacks
29. Using Pulumi with Docker and Containers
30. Using Pulumi’s CLI for Resource Management and Automation
¶ Intermediate Level
31. Working with Advanced Cloud Resources in Pulumi: Lambda, Functions, and More
32. Using Pulumi for Serverless Architecture
33. Building and Managing Kubernetes Clusters with Pulumi
34. Configuring Auto-scaling and Load Balancers in Pulumi
35. Integrating Pulumi with GitOps for Continuous Delivery
36. Managing Secrets and Sensitive Information in Pulumi
37. Using Pulumi’s Cross-Platform Infrastructure Management
38. Pulumi for Network Security: VPCs, Security Groups, and Firewalls
39. Creating and Managing Infrastructure Using Pulumi in Multi-Region Environments
40. Using Pulumi to Automate Infrastructure Scaling
41. Building Multi-Cloud Infrastructure with Pulumi
42. Managing Identity and Access with Pulumi IAM Resources
43. Pulumi in DevOps: Automating Deployments and Infrastructure Changes
44. Advanced Resource Management: Importing Existing Resources into Pulumi
45. Managing Pulumi Stacks Across Multiple Environments (Dev, QA, Prod)
46. Pulumi for Infrastructure Monitoring and Observability
47. Integrating Pulumi with Jenkins for Continuous Deployment
48. Using Pulumi to Manage Kubernetes Deployments and Configurations
49. Deploying Infrastructure on Google Cloud with Pulumi
50. Handling Pulumi State in Remote Backends (S3, Azure Blob Storage, etc.)
51. Setting Up Pulumi’s Team Collaboration and Permissions
52. Using Pulumi to Provision Networking Resources (VPCs, Subnets, Gateways)
53. Working with Pulumi’s Custom Resource Providers
54. Creating and Managing Multi-Tier Applications with Pulumi
55. Implementing Infrastructure Testing with Pulumi
56. Using Pulumi with Azure for Cross-Platform Cloud Development
57. Managing Containers and Kubernetes Resources with Pulumi
58. Monitoring Infrastructure Provisioned by Pulumi
59. Implementing Continuous Integration Pipelines with Pulumi
60. Working with Pulumi’s Cloud API to Automate Deployments
61. Defining and Managing Serverless Functions with Pulumi
62. Managing DNS and Load Balancing with Pulumi
63. Creating and Managing Virtual Machines on Azure with Pulumi
64. Creating and Managing Lambda Functions with Pulumi
65. Using Pulumi to Manage Secrets with AWS Secrets Manager or Azure Key Vault
66. Creating and Configuring Cloud Databases with Pulumi
67. Using Pulumi to Provision AWS, Azure, and GCP Storage Solutions
68. Managing Autoscaling and Load Balancer Resources in Pulumi
69. Creating Virtual Networks and Subnets with Pulumi
70. Exploring Pulumi's Support for Kubernetes as Code
¶ Advanced Level
71. Advanced Pulumi Patterns: Multi-Account and Multi-Region Deployments
72. Integrating Pulumi with Hybrid Cloud Environments
73. Optimizing Pulumi State Management for Large Teams
74. Building Complex CI/CD Pipelines with Pulumi and GitHub Actions
75. Creating Custom Pulumi Providers for Non-Supported Resources
76. Building a Multi-Tenant Application with Pulumi
77. Using Pulumi to Build and Manage Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
78. Defining and Implementing Infrastructure Security Policies with Pulumi
79. Advanced Resource Lifecycle Management in Pulumi
80. Integrating Pulumi with Terraform and CloudFormation
81. Using Pulumi with Kubernetes Operators for Dynamic Infrastructure
82. Building Scalable and Resilient Infrastructure with Pulumi
83. Managing Cross-Cloud Deployments with Pulumi
84. Implementing Service Meshes and Networking Policies with Pulumi
85. Using Pulumi for Edge Computing and IoT Infrastructure
86. Advanced Resource Provisioning with Pulumi: Conditional Logic and Loops
87. Defining Infrastructure as Code for Microservices with Pulumi
88. Building Complex Network Architectures with Pulumi
89. Using Pulumi for Continuous Security and Compliance Audits
90. Working with Pulumi’s Cross-Platform Resource Management Features
91. Using Pulumi for Advanced Disaster Recovery and Backup Strategies
92. Designing Infrastructure as Code for Disaster Recovery in Pulumi
93. Advanced Kubernetes Resource Management with Pulumi
94. Managing Versioned Infrastructure Deployments with Pulumi
95. Exploring Pulumi’s Real-Time Monitoring and Diagnostics
96. Building Infrastructure for Big Data Workloads with Pulumi
97. Leveraging Pulumi for Zero Downtime Deployments
98. Scaling Infrastructure with Pulumi for Enterprise Applications
99. Implementing Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) in Infrastructure with Pulumi
100. The Future of Infrastructure as Code: Leveraging Pulumi in DevOps Transformation