pulumi

One of the reasons I prefer Pulumi over Terraform is the additional control I have over my processes due to the fact that it’s a programming language. For example, I have a CLI, that creates a cluster of machines for a user; the machines use IAM Authentication with Vault so that they can request certificates on boot. The trouble with this application is that it is slow; it takes 175 seconds on average to provision the machines, write the IAM information to Vault, and then re-run the cloud-init script on all the machines in the cluster (as when they first booted, the configuration hadn’t been written to Vault yet....

This article was originally published on the Pulumi blog. When using the Pulumi Automation API to create applications which can provision infrastructure, it is very handy to be able to use observability techniques to ensure the application functions correctly and to help see where performance bottlenecks are. One of the applications I work on creates a VPC and Bastion host and then stores the credentials into a Vault instance. The problem is that the “create infrastructure” part is an opaque blob, in that I can see it takes 129 seconds to create, but I can’t see what it’s doing, or why it takes this amount of time....