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g

gifted-controller-71470

04/14/2021, 1:58 AM
Hi, I am new to pulumi. Can anyone tell me how pulumi is useful, meaning what all I get with pulumi? Also, Can I use it with aws only?
d

delightful-salesclerk-16161

04/14/2021, 1:58 AM
how familiar are you with infrastructure as code?
g

gifted-controller-71470

04/14/2021, 1:58 AM
beginner actually
d

delightful-salesclerk-16161

04/14/2021, 1:59 AM
so Pulumi can be used with AWS, Azure, GCP, K8s, and a lot of other providers...full list here: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/cloud-providers/
so the concept of infrastructre as code (IaC) is you basically model out your infrastructure using a templating language (JSON or YAML). you eliminate manual changes to infrastructure which will reduce errors. that template you create can be checked into source control and versioned. it's a way to gain greater repeatability and control over infrastructure
now the older IaC tools was built for a different era where cloud infrastructure was mainly static, there was a distinction between infrastructure and application, applications weren't as distributed, etc.
Pulumi is the next generation of IaC tools for modern cloud infrastructure. 1/ Instead of using JSON or YAML, you can use a real programming language. This allows you to use IDEs built for the language with code completion and things like that. You can also take advantage of unit testing frameworks for those languages. 2/ Pulumi spans all the major cloud providers and SaaS vendors which is useful because most applications these days use a variety of different providers. 3/ You can dynamically provision infrastructure directly from your application rather than calling everything from the CLI. 4/ Pulumi has a feature that enforces policy allowing stronger organizational control for compliance
let me know if that makes sense and where else i can elaborate
g

gifted-controller-71470

04/14/2021, 2:20 AM
Thanks, Aaron. It is very insightful. In my case, we have our own on-prem cloud service. Will I be able to configure that with pulumi.
d

delightful-salesclerk-16161

04/14/2021, 2:21 AM
depends. what is the underlying technology you are using for that cloud service?
g

gifted-controller-71470

04/14/2021, 7:10 AM
Can we use it with docker containers?
b

better-shampoo-48884

04/14/2021, 8:58 AM
Absolutely!
Though usually "with" docker containers needs a bit of a think-through.. Pulumi is generally declarative, which means that for instance if you want to run a container on kubernetes, you use the kubernetes resource provider to schedule the container
But there is also the Docker provider if you need to create containers and configure them and so on.
a

average-house-56299

04/14/2021, 6:19 PM
Does Pulumi lock you in? What if I wanted to use another tool later on, can I migrate from the SaaS to something else like Terraform Cloud or etc? I assume any data on the SaaS can’t be exported?
g

gentle-diamond-70147

04/14/2021, 7:26 PM
Your Pulumi stack state that is stored in the SaaS can be exported at any time with the
pulumi stack export ...
command. We talk about how to move from one of the other backends to the SaaS at https://www.pulumi.com/docs/troubleshooting/faq/#ive-been-using-the-local-endpoint-can-i-migrate-to-pulumicom. You would reverse those steps to move from SaaS to another backend.