Pulumi Extends Ability to Manage Kubernetes Infrastructure

Pulumi today at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 conference extended its support for Kubernetes environments to include an Operator that can now be hosted on its dedicated pod.

In addition, Pulumi has integrated with External Secrets Operator, a tool for managing secrets that runs natively on a Kubernetes cluster.
Finally, Pulumi has added support for Amazon Linux 2023 and Bottlerocket operating systems and Security Groups for pods running on the Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Pulumi has also enhanced its ability to manage Helm Chart resources, enhance, and await logic along with now providing better CustomResource support via the crd2pulumi application programming interface (API).

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Aaron Kao, vice president of marketing for Pulumi, said these extensions will make it simpler for centralized IT teams to manage Kubernetes workloads that are becoming increasingly distributed across multiple cloud computing environments. The latest edition of the Pulumi Kubernetes Operator makes it simple to embrace GitOps practices by setting up dedicated “workspace” pods for each stack, noted Kao.
Pulumi has been making a case for an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platform that enables developers to use familiar programming languages such as Java to provision IT environments. As a result, a developer can set up a managed Kubernetes service such as Amazon EKS using a single line of code.

At the same time, Pulumi has been investing in generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to streamline the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure using a natural language interface that reduces the overall level of programming expertise that might be required.
Additionally, Pulumi has added a Pulumi Insights application for both discovering cloud assets and assessing the level of security risk created by, for example, misconfigurations.

More than a decade after the arrival of cloud computing, organizations are still struggling with how to securely provision these environments. The challenge that many face is cloud services are usually provisioned by application development teams that are more concerned with productivity than necessarily security. Many of them lack the expertise needed to securely configure those services. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have become especially adept at discovering and exploiting, for example, a misconfigured S3 cloud storage service to exfiltrate data.

Pulumi enables IT teams to address those issues using a centralized platform through which specific policies can be enforced across a mix of cloud-native and legacy monolithic applications.

It’s not clear to what degree organizations are looking to centralize the provisioning of cloud infrastructure, however, with the rise of platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale there is clearly a lot more interest. The challenge is implementing a set of defined policies that application developers will embrace rather than using their programming expertise to circumvent.

Regardless of approach, it should become simpler for IT teams augmented by generative AI to centrally manage cloud computing environments in collaboration with DevOps engineers. The challenge, of course, is to provide those teams with a centralized platform that enables the level of collaboration required.