developer-first infrastructure: an opinionated take on infrastructure as code

Pulumi has been busy lately recently, hiring extensively, hiring well (oh my god Matty Stratton and Kat Cosgrove are both on the Developer Advocate team!) and building out its platform. It has some interesting announcements coming up next week at its PulumiUP conference. My colleague Dr. Kelly Fitzpatrick is moderating a session there. You should check it out. In the meantime, this week it began the drumbeat for an opinionated take on infrastructure as code which CEO Joe Duffy calls developer-first infrastructure.

The core idea is to describe an approach to infrastructure as code which looks something like the seminal Twelve Factor Apps work by Adam Wiggins, which influenced so much modern software engineering.

For Pulumi developer-first infrastructure means

1. Unified Engineering: Software engineering tools and practices for applications and infrastructure.
2. APIs: Making everything programmable and composable with APIs.
3. Everything as Code: Use “as code” techniques like infrastructure as code and policy as code.
4. Polyglot: Embrace the best language ecosystems for the job at hand.
5. Modularity: Tackle complexity with real sharing and reuse, not copy & paste.
6. Continuous Delivery: Deliver and scale applications and infrastructure with automated techniques.
7. Continuous Verification: Verify and enforce guardrails at all times.
8. Environment Parity: Share as much as possible between dev, test, and prod environments.
9. Securely Configured: Loosely couple and securely configure environments.
10. Distributed Architectures: Go beyond “lift and shift” to building truly cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
11. Observable: Instrument applications and infrastructure to log high cardinality events, early and often.

I am a sucker for a good manifesto, and enjoyed talking to Joe on this video we recorded about the idea. I particularly liked the way Joe presented industry history to back up his ideas – who doesn’t enjoy dorking out about the way tech infrastructure (languages, runtimes, operating systems) has moved steadily up the stack to higher level abstractions? Please watch the video and let me know what you think. Smash like, etc. Also if you’re got any feedback or thoughts on the model for Joe he’s funcofjoe on twitter.

Joe is definitely not alone in thinking we need more of the modern software mindset brought to the problem of infrastructure automation. That’s pretty much the whole point of the “as code” movement. A good companion would be Rod Johnson’s Software Defined Delivery Manifesto.

Anyway here is the conversation.

Pulumi is a RedMonk client, and sponsored the video.