Pulumi today previewed an internal developer platform (IDP) through which DevOps and platform engineering teams will be able to access reusable building blocks that can be used to create templates and blueprints to build applications.
Scheduled to be generally available later this year for self-hosted environments or via a software-as-service (SaaS) application, Pulumi IDP will be made available at no extra cost to the company’s existing base of more than 3,500 customers.
The overall goal is to make it simpler for DevOps teams of any skill level to set up golden paths for building applications using an IDP that provides drift and policy detection and remediation tools, auditing of outdated components and templates, and change management when rolling out updated versions.
Additionally, there are approval workflows to enable teams to delegate and maintain guardrails, a visual import tool that helps teams bring existing unmanaged cloud infrastructure under the management of Pulumi with just a few clicks, and an integrated identity access management (IAM) tool to ensure least privilege controls are maintained.
Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy said DevOps teams will also be able to employ a mix of graphical, lowcode, REST application programming interfaces (APIs), programming tools and DevOps pipelines as they best see fit to deploy and update the Pulumi IDP.
Eventually, Pulumi will also extend its existing generative artificial intelligence (AI) tooling to create AI agents that will automate many existing IDP management tasks, noted Duffy.
While IDPs have been gaining traction as a means to apply guardrails to self-service workflows that developers employ to access software components and infrastructure-as-code, they typically require a lot of software engineering expertise. Pulumi is pursuing an alternative approach that provides built-in search, semantic versioning, documentation and usage tracking tools to make it easy to discover and share patterns.
Compatible with TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java or YAML software components, the registry that is at the code of the Pulumi IDP will make it simpler to enforce security, compliance, cost controls and other operational rules, said Duffy.
Many DevOps and platform engineering teams have, of course, already built and deployed an IDP. However, managing, updating and securing those platforms requires a lot of undifferentiated effort that doesn’t necessarily contribute to the bottom line of an organization, noted Duffy.
Pulumi is making a case for an extensible alternative IDP that is easier to integrate with multiple existing DevOps tools and platforms, including the open source Backstage IDP originally developed by Spotify, he added. Pulumi is also willing to meet customers wherever they are on the road to adopting best platform engineering practices, said Duffy.
IDPs, of course, are not a new concept, but as more organizations realize how much productivity there is to be gained by ensuring developers have access to a set of secure reusable components that they can directly download, there is now a greater appreciation for their need. The challenge is that many DevOps teams have found IDPs to be more complex to deploy and maintain than anticipated.
Hopefully, there will come a day when IDPs can be taken more for granted. In the meantime, however, DevOps teams may need to revisit their decision to build versus buy an IDP when there are so many other pressing concerns to address.
