Pulumi Cloud Framework (Preview)
Pulumi Cloud Framework is our multi-cloud framework for building modern container and serverless cloud applications.
This is a preview library demonstrating how to build Pulumi components that can abstract over and target multiple clouds.
For developers targeting a single cloud platform like AWS, Azure or GCP, we recommend using the @pulumi/aws, @pulumi/azure and @pulumi/gcp packages respectively. These packages give you full access to the breadth of the platform's capabilities and come with many abstractions to make developing against that platform easier.
Installing
This package is available for Node.js (JavaScript or TypeScript).
To install the core API package, use either npm:
$ npm install @pulumi/cloud
or yarn:
$ yarn add @pulumi/cloud
Note that there are implementation packages for each major cloud provider that you will need also.
For AWS, install the package using either npm:
$ npm install @pulumi/cloud-aws
or yarn:
$ yarn add @pulumi/cloud-aws
Note: At the moment, only Amazon Web Services (AWS) support is fleshed out enough to be used. Azure support is currently being worked on and is in an early preview state. It can be used, but issues may be encountered. To use Azure change the above lines to:
$ npm install @pulumi/cloud-azure
$ yarn add @pulumi/cloud-azure
We also intend to support GCP in the future. #518 tracks this request.
Concepts
The Pulumi Cloud Framework is in preview. It provides abstractions that can allow one to write a cloud-application on many different cloud providers (i.e. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)), using a common API.
There is an abstraction package, @pulumi/cloud, that defines the APIs common to all cloud
providers. This provides a highly productive view on modern cloud architectures, akin to Java or
.NET's approach to operating systems. Because these abstractions allow one to operate over
different cloud platforms in a consistent manner, low level functionality and capabilities of the
individual platforms are intentionally not exposed.
There are implementation packages for individual cloud providers, such as @pulumi/cloud-aws, which
first and foremost implement those APIs for the target cloud in question, but also offer more
specific functionality in the form of derived classes that provide cloud-specific functionality.
This allows you to mix multi-cloud code with cloud-specific logic.
Note that you are free, of course, to intersperse these abstractions with specific resources in your cloud platform of choice, using the appropriate Pulumi platform framework. This delivers the highest fidelity possible. For example, pulumi/pulumi-aws or pulumi/pulumi-azure. These frameworks will give access to the full power of those platforms, but will in turn create applications specific to them.
Packages
Currently, Pulumi Cloud contains two primary packages: api and aws.
@pulumi/cloud defines the cloud
abstractions common to building modern cloud applications, and can be used by any Pulumi application
directly for cloud-neutral logic. For example, the Service type expresses a load balanced
container, API exposes simple serverless functions over HTTP, and timer allows you to schedule
timers. All serverless functions are expressed using lambdas in your language of choice. The
package also offers simple data abstractions, systems like Table and Bucket.
@pulumi/cloud-aws supplies an implementation
of those abstractions, built on top of the @pulumi/aws library. Its implementation types offer
more AWS-specific functionality than is available in the @pulumi/cloud package.
To use either, simply reference them in the usual NPM style in your program. You may decide to code against either the APIs or the implementation types, depending on the style of code you're writing and functionality you need.
If you code against @pulumi/cloud directly, you will need to configure your program before running
pulumi update. This can be done simply by running the pulumi config set command; for instance,
to select aws, you will run:
$ pulumi config set cloud:provider aws
For more details see the examples in examples, or online at: https://docs.pulumi.com/quickstart/
Reference
For detailed reference documentation, please visit the API docs site for this package: