Pulumi is a startup that has created a multi-language automated Infrastructure-as-Code method of deploying cloud-native apps on any cloud.
It claims its open-source Infrastructure as Code SDK is an easy way to create and deploy cloud software that uses stateless and stateful containers, serverless functions, hosted services, and infrastructure, on any cloud. Pulumi says its software supports more than 200 public and private clouds, and reckons it has more than 1,500 customers and 100,000-plus users.
CEO and co-founder Joe Duffy explained Pulumi’s technology to an IT Press Tour briefing in January, showing slides that refer to how containerization and public cloud has disrupted virtualized on-premises server app development. What Pulumi says it’s doing is building a generic DevOps replacement platform using third parties’ point products and abstraction layers.
It claims that it provides a “Your cloud, your language, your way” facility to software engineers.
Developers, in general, are faced with a complex maze of integrated development environments, code tools, packages, languages, clouds, storage and data management providers, development support tools, identity management and so on.
The number of products which Pulumi brings into its platform is indicated by a partner ecosysten slide:
It’s a bewildering list, and indicates that API access is of fundamental importance in this world. DevOps’ concerns with storage is a minority play; if you look hard you can see NetApp and MinIO in this list.
Pulumi says its SaaS technology provides an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that uses the most popular programming languages to simplify provisioning and managing cloud resources. With IaC, DevOps teams can deploy and manage infrastructure at scale and across multiple providers with simple configuration file instructions. A written configuration file is executed to deploy desired environments automatically. Developers can write configuration files in Python, Go, JavaScript, or TypeScript, and not domain-specific languages. Pulumi’s algorithms define the type of environment required, and its automation code deploys it.
DevOps can deploy and manage any type of cloud infrastructure — virtual servers, containers, applications, or serverless functions – across multiple cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or PNAP Bare Metal Cloud.
Pulumi counts Snowflake , Atlassian, Mercedes-Benz and Panther among its customers.
Check out Pulumi’s documentation resources to find out more.
Company background
Pulumi was started in 2017 by CEO Joe Duffy – ex-Partner Director of Technical Strategy and Developer Tools at Microsoft – and exec chairman Eric Rudder, an ex-EVP and Chief Technical Strategy Officer at Microsoft. Duffy told briefing attendees that he ran Microsoft’s Developer Tools and Platform strategy, managed the languages and Visual Studio groups, took .NET open source, and invented key developer technologies. Rudder founded and scaled Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business to $10B+, and created the Visual Studio and .NET product lines.
Pulumi has raised $57.5 million to date, with a $37.5 million B-round in 2020 preceeded by a $15million A-round and $5 million seed raise in 2018. These are not classic startup engineers but developer execs who saw a multi-cloud, multi-language, cloud-native deployment capability need, and went out to get it built.
The company has around 100 employees across six countries including the US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands.
