In an exclusive interview with VMblog, Joe Duffy, CEO and co-founder of Pulumi, reveals the company's groundbreaking vision for the future of cloud infrastructure. As Pulumi celebrates its 4th annual PulumiUp conference, Duffy introduces the concept of the "Intelligent Cloud," a revolutionary approach that combines AI, automation, and human expertise to tackle the growing complexities of multi-cloud environments.

The interview dives into Pulumi's latest innovations, including the general availability of Pulumi ESC (Environment, Secrets, and Configuration) and the preview of Insights 2.0. These advancements promise to transform how organizations manage, secure, and optimize their cloud resources. Duffy also sheds light on Pulumi's evolution from an Infrastructure-as-Code leader to a comprehensive platform driving the future of cloud operations.

VMblog:  Before we dive into the news you're announcing today, historically Pulumi has been known as one of the Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) leaders in the marketplace. For our readers that are fuzzy on the meaning of Infrastructure as Code and what Pulumi does, could you explain?

Joe Duffy:  Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, is a modern approach to managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure through code rather than manual processes. At Pulumi, we've taken this concept a step further by allowing developers to use familiar programming languages to define and manage their cloud resources.

Using Pulumi, end users describe their entire cloud infrastructure - from servers and databases to networking and security policies - using languages they already know, such as Python, TypeScript, Go, C#, or Java. Pulumi then automates the full infrastructure lifecycle for them.

What sets Pulumi apart is our ability to leverage the full power of programming languages. This lets us stand on the shoulders of giants - tapping into amazing developer experiences, tools, and ecosystems - and brings software engineering practices to infrastructure management. This includes version control, testing, refactoring, and automation, while enabling end users to leverage rich language facilities - such as loops, functions, and classes - making it easier to scale and maintain complex cloud environments. Pulumi works across over 170 public, private, and SaaS cloud providers, enabling true multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

VMblog:  Today at your 4th annual PulumiUp conference, you've made a few important announcements and unveiled a new vision for AI powered cloud infrastructure. The first is announcing the general availability of Pulumi ESC? What is Pulumi ESC and how does it benefit users?

Duffy:  Pulumi ESC stands for Environment, Secrets, and Configuration. It is our solution to the growing challenges of secrets and configuration management in complex cloud environments. We've seen incredible organic adoption of ESC while in beta, and it is now generally available.

In today's fast-moving cloud landscape, security needs to be front and center. Yet, many organizations struggle to keep their most sensitive information secure, especially when scaling and empowering developers to move fast. This includes cloud credentials, passwords, API keys, and certificates. ESC was designed to enable teams to move faster without compromising security. We like to say that ESC enables "the security pit of success" - security is automatic.

Pulumi ESC was designed around a novel concept of an "environment" which is a logical container of related secrets and configuration. You define an environment by grouping its related configuration and settings keys/values together. This environment is then versioned together atomically, allowing smooth migration between configurations, in addition to tagging, full history complete with diffs, and auditing of changes. Environments are also the unit of access control. Environments benefit from the same Pulumi Cloud identity features that IaC does, including RBAC, Teams, SAML/SCIM, and scoped access tokens. Environments are also composable, and can be organized into projects, centralizing configuration and eliminating sprawl.

ESC enables security best practices seamlessly. Pulumi ESC supports static secrets with rich encryption and controls, however, dynamic, short-lived credentials are the default and easier to use than any other product. Pulumi ESC connects to credential providers via OpenID Connect (OIDC), allowing it to provide such credentials on demand. This ensures secure, just-in-time access and reduces the risk associated with long-lived credentials being compromised.

As organizations grow, secrets stores have a habit of proliferating. A single team might keep secrets in AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault, 1Password, and perhaps even GitHub. Pulumi ESC consolidates this scattered landscape. It pulls and synchronizes secrets and configuration data from all the popular secrets stores-including those mentioned above. It is then effortless to use these secrets securely wherever they're needed, including any application, tool, or CI/CD pipeline. Whether you're using the CLI, API, Kubernetes operator, Pulumi Cloud UI, or coding with Node.js, Python, or Go SDKs, Pulumi ESC has you covered.

VMblog:  Pulumi is also announcing the preview of Insights 2.0 today. What is Pulumi Insights and what new features and benefits are included in Insights 2.0?

Duffy:  Pulumi Insights delivers full visibility into an organization's cloud assets with intelligent management. Previously this was limited to infrastructure provisioned by Pulumi IaC, however, with Insights 2.0 we're taking this to the next level by providing a comprehensive view of an organization's entire cloud infrastructure, regardless of how it was provisioned. That means Insights works if you've used Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, ARM, or even ClickOps.

It begins with an asset inventory. Pulumi Insights already understands any resources provisioned by Pulumi IaC, but for the rest, you point Pulumi Insights at your cloud accounts and Kubernetes clusters, with secure access configured with Pulumi ESC, and Pulumi builds an inventory of all cloud resources and their configurations, complete with inferred dependencies. We call this the Pulumi supergraph and as soon as it's connected, you get rich navigation with pivot-tables, reporting and dashboards, policy as code thanks to Pulumi CrossGuard, and intelligence because Pulumi Copilot automatically understands all of it.

The key features and benefits of Insights 2.0 include:

1. Complete visibility: It imports and continuously syncs every piece of cloud infrastructure, even resources not provisioned by Pulumi, delivering a holistic view of your cloud environments.
2. Intelligent modeling: Insights 2.0 builds a model of infrastructure relationships and tracks changes over time, providing a deep understanding of how resources interact and evolve over time.
3. Compliance and security enforcement: All cloud resources are scanned for company policies and security best practices, powered by Pulumi CrossGuard, complete with automatic remediations of policy violations.
4. Cost optimization: By understanding cloud usage patterns, Insights 2.0 helps organizations discover potential cost savings through identification of cloud waste.
5. Enhanced efficiency and reliability: By providing a complete picture of the cloud environment, Insights 2.0 drives better decision-making, leading to improved efficiency and reliability across all cloud assets.
6. AI-powered analytics: Leveraging artificial intelligence, Insights 2.0 can provide predictive analytics and intelligent recommendations for optimizing cloud infrastructure.
7. Better together with IaC: Report on which IaC tools are managing which resources - or are completely unmanaged - and bring them under the control of Pulumi IaC with the click of a button.

Insights 2.0 is a game-changer for organizations struggling with the complexity of their cloud environments. It provides the visibility and intelligence needed to make informed decisions, optimize resources, and ensure compliance across all cloud assets.

VMblog:  In today's PulumiUp conference keynote, you laid out an important vision for Pulumi called the Intelligent Cloud, which is anchored around AI-powered cloud infrastructure. Can you expand on what that means?

Duffy:  The Intelligent Cloud represents our vision for the future of cloud operations - a future where AI and automation work hand-in-hand with human expertise to manage increasingly complex cloud environments.

At its core, the Intelligent Cloud is about leveraging the power of AI to automate, secure, and manage all aspects of cloud infrastructure. This vision is realized through three key components.

Pulumi IaC (Infrastructure as Code)

We're enhancing our existing IaC capabilities with AI to automate cloud infrastructure management. This means leveraging generative AI alongside traditional programming languages to create more intelligent, adaptive, and self-optimizing infrastructure.

Pulumi ESC (Environment, Secrets, and Configuration)

This component brings AI-powered security to cloud operations, providing intelligent secrets management that adapts to the organization's needs and automatically enforces best practices.

Pulumi Insights

With AI at its core, Insights provides deep analytics and predictive capabilities, helping organizations understand their cloud usage, optimize costs, and proactively address potential issues.

The Intelligent Cloud is designed to address the unprecedented challenges that cloud developers and operations teams face in managing complex, multi-cloud environments. By combining AI with our expertise in infrastructure as code, we're aiming to:

• Democratize access to the cloud by making it easier for teams of all skill levels to manage complex infrastructure.
• Enable more effective collaboration between developers, infrastructure teams, and security professionals.
• Provide built-in automation that adapts to changing conditions and requirements.
• Offer predictive insights that help organizations stay ahead of potential issues and optimize their cloud usage.
• Ensure security and compliance are baked into every aspect of cloud operations.

In essence, the Intelligent Cloud is about making the cloud work smarter for organizations, allowing them to focus on innovation and business value rather than getting bogged down in the complexities of cloud management.

VMblog:  You have some great presenters lined up at the PulumiUp conference today. Can you list some? Also, if our readers aren't able to attend the virtual conference today, will these interviews be available on demand at a later date?

Duffy:  Absolutely! We're thrilled with the lineup of speakers at this year's PulumiUP conference. We have industry leaders and innovators from a wide range of companies sharing their insights on building and scaling on the cloud through Infrastructure as Code, Platform Engineering, and AI.

In addition to general industry topics, we'll also hear many end user stories about how teams have adopted Pulumi, including BMW whose CodeCraft platform leverages Pulumi to power cloud-connected car innovation at scale. Other notable speakers include JPMorgan, AWS, Google Cloud, Docker, and SAP, among others.

We understand that not everyone can attend the live event, so all the sessions, including keynotes and panels, will be available on-demand after the conference. Everyone, including anyone who couldn't make it to the live event, will be able to access all the content after the conference. To learn more, sign up for the event or Pulumi newsletter, or check out our website after the event.

We believe the insights shared at PulumiUP will be valuable for months to come, so we want to ensure that as many people as possible can benefit from the knowledge and experiences shared by our speakers. We hope you enjoy the conference and learn something new!