Hello all!
Welcome to the next issue of the Tidy Cloud AWS bulletin!
This issue of the bulletin talks about Pulumi, including PulumiUP conference. There are also some notes about interesting tools for terminal application and shell users.
Enjoy!
PulumiUP
More news around Pulumi: At the time of this writing, the first Pulumi-oriented Pulumi conference PulumiUP will start in about 8-9 hours, on May 4th. PulumiUP is a free virtual conference over two days which promises to have a bunch of interesting stuff if you are curious about Pulumi for infrastructure-as-code.
The link to the conference website is https://www.pulumi.com/pulumi-up/
It is not Pulumi’s (the company) first conference though. They have arranged multiple Cloud Engineering summits, which have been quite nice virtual conferences around cloud engineering with a sprinkle of Pulumi in them. I can recommend checking out the Cloud Engineering summit materials online as well. There are some very nice talks there.
I am curious to see what PulumiUP brings, although in terms of time zones the times may not be optimal for me.
Update: Wow!
I am very excited about several news coming out of PulumiUP today!
https://www.pulumi.com/blog/pulumi-universal-iac/
These announcements are all interesting (I think so, at least)! The Pulumi YAML option is exciting, because that means you can build and use higher-level components and let them be exposed to people who are not so keen on writing programming language code. This is something I have felt been a shortcoming of these infrastructure-as-code solutions with programming languages, and I am glad to see that Pulumi provides an option here. Back in the old days, AWS CDK had something like that, although it vanished at some point.
Pulumi now has support for Java, or any JVM-based language. This is a quite nice addition which I hope to try out with some JVM-based languages and see how that works out.
Pulumi Crosswalk for all supported languages. Crosswalk is Pulumi’s packaging of some higher-level components for AWS infrastructure, which initially was just available for Typescript/JavaScript. This has been an advantage for AWS CDK, which has a lot of higher-level constructs for many AWS resources, and for all its supported languages. Which leads to the next new feature…
AWS CDK on Pulumi is another new feature which is very exciting. It seems to be an option to use a lot of constructs provided by AWS CDK, but use Pulumi for resource provisioning instead, skipping CloudFormation. One strength of AWS CDK is all the higher level constructs that are available. If even a decent subset of them can be used via Pulumi instead, that is very exciting!
Improvements for importing existing resources (ClickOps-based) into Pulumi and it can also convert from both Terraform and CloudFormation into Pulumi code.
A playlist from the PulumiUP conference can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyy8Vx2ZoWlpcvhSsUXdT5CXjRwAaM_My
Pulumi Quick Bites
Pulumi is a company and a product that I do like. Just as an organisation and a group of people, I think they do a very nice job of pushing for better ways to do cloud engineering, and have discussions on how we can manage cloud solutions and cloud infrastructure better. One approach is their Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering series on YouTube, which are videos a few minutes long explaining some concept in cloud engineering (including cloud engineering itself). I would say that it is aimed at people fairly new to the concepts and ideas, and tries to explain some terms and concepts in simple ways.
Check it out!
Warp
If you are like me, you may spend a lot of time in a terminal window, using command-line tools. While there has been some evolution for command-line shells, there has not been a lot of development for the terminal itself. The feature set is very similar to what it was decades ago, perhaps with a bit more colouring, size and font options. But other than that, it is the same.
Through the Changelog podcast, I learned about Warp. It is an application which is trying to re-invent in the space of terminal applications and brings several new features. I have played around a bit with Warp, and I am excited about the opportunities that it presents!
There is an introduction video on the Warp website. Although it conveys some information about the product, it has some room for improvement to make you excited about the product.
Another video that conveys more excitement for Warp, is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSXpwOElFY0
I think Warp shows a lot of promise, but it is still in beta stage and it is only available for macOS at this point in time. There is also a concern from many people that it currently requires you to login via GitHub and collect telemetry data. Listening to the Changelog podcast, the developers state this is only for improvement of the product, in particular now during its beta phase. It is a valid concern and will turn away many people from the product at this stage.
I am running Warp myself, but I have not switched away from other terminal software. Time will tell how it works out, but I think it is a neat project.
NuShell
Through the Changelog podcast, actually the same episode that talked about Warp terminal, there was also a brief mention of NuShell. It was enough to pique my interest though, and I found it to be quite interesting!
NuShell has been inspired both by traditional shells like bash, and PowerShell and also a few programming language concepts. I was quite happy to see the combination of bash-style commands with PowerShell-style structured data! I really like that aspect of PowerShell, and it is powerful. However, the long form of command names in PowerShell, which makes it verbose, has stopped me from taking a more complete switch to PowerShell. Only some scripting tasks I have preferred to do in PowerShell.
With NuShell being a happy mix of some good parts, it looks like an interesting match! There will probably be more to come on NuShell in later issues of the bulletin.
You can find the contents of this bulletin and older ones, and more at Cloudgnosis.org. You will also find other useful articles around AWS automation and infrastructure-as-software.
Until next time,
/Erik