Pulumi Corporation has unveiled Pulumi IDP, a new internal developer platform designed to accelerate and secure cloud infrastructure delivery at scale. The platform builds upon Pulumi’s existing infrastructure as code (IaC) technology to help organisations automate and manage their cloud infrastructure operations..
The new offering aims to help platform engineering teams struggling to build flexible workflows that also accommodate the necessary security and compliance requirements. According to Pulumi, the platform enables these teams to codify “golden paths” for infrastructure deployment while providing self-service capabilities through workflows that are tailored to different technical skill levels.
Citing a customer case study, Pulumi’s core offering allows organisations to move from lower-level Terraform and HCL-based IaC to a simpler-to-use YAML schema. The customer claims this makes cloud infrastructure easy for developers to use.
At the core of Pulumi IDP is a Private Registry that serves as a central repository for standardised infrastructure components, templates, providers and policies. This registry aims to solve problems of discoverability and lifecycle management that organisations often encounter when trying to reuse infrastructure patterns. Platform engineers can publish components with a single command, making them immediately discoverable to end users who can explore documentation and usage instructions directly from the registry.
In contrast to competing platforms like Backstage, Port, and OpsLevel, Pulumi IDP takes an infrastructure-first approach rather than focusing primarily on service catalogues or developer portals. While these other platforms typically require integration with existing IaC tools, Pulumi IDP builds directly upon Pulumi’s own infrastructure as code foundation, potentially offering tighter integration between the platform interface and the underlying infrastructure management. However, unlike some competitors that provide comprehensive application lifecycle management, Pulumi IDP appears more focused on infrastructure provisioning and management workflows.
Responding to an AMA on Reddit, Pulumi’s Mark Huber explains how Pulumi IDP can be used for infrastructure provisioning:
Because Pulumi IDP is based on our IaC building blocks—components and templates—it inherently facilitates provisioning. Our goal is to enable platform engineers to define their building blocks once […] but allow them to be used in any provisioning workflow
The platform supports three distinct workflow approaches to accommodate varying levels of technical expertise.
- No-code allows users to instantly create and deploy Pulumi programs without writing infrastructure code.
- Low-code enables users to build their own programs using approved components discovered through the private registry.
- Full-code gives developers complete control over scaffolding infrastructure using templates or writing Pulumi code from scratch in their preferred programming language.
Huber explains the logic behind offering the three workflows:
Most platform engineer teams we’ve spoken to fall somewhere in the middle – they want to author the most widely used or sensitive components, such as IAM, k8s clusters, storage, etc., but still let their users author their own components.
A new “Services” feature enables teams to logically group stacks, environments and resources to reflect organisational structures, with support for metadata that provides context such as links to observability dashboards and communication channels. This organisational context is designed to simplify day-to-day operations after infrastructure is deployed.
“CTOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders tell us that the pace of innovation is faster than ever,” said Joe Duffy, co-founder and CEO of Pulumi. “To succeed, developers must move fast – without breaking things. Pulumi IDP is the cloud infrastructure platform modern teams have been asking for: infrastructure-first, multi-cloud, immensely powerful and flexible, with built-in security and full visibility and controls.”
Pulumi claims more than 3,500 customers and 350,000 users worldwide, with their software reportedly downloaded over a million times weekly. The company cites Gartner forecasts suggesting that 80% of large organisations will adopt internal developer platforms within the next two years, driven by the need to ship cloud innovations faster while maintaining security and compliance.
Pulumi IDP is currently available in public preview and is free for existing Pulumi customers and community members, with general availability and enterprise pricing expected later this year. The platform can be deployed either as a managed SaaS solution or self-hosted for organisations with advanced compliance requirements.
