I recently made a simple comparison between Pulumi and Terraform for a customer. Both are tools that belong to the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) family. Here is what I have experienced with Pulumi.

Installing Pulumi

I decided to go with Python. Other options would have been Node.js, .Net or Go. For Python the following packages are needed at least (for Debian 10):

sudo apt install azure-cli
sudo apt-get install python3
sudo apt-get pip install virtualenv python3-virtualenv

installing Pulumi on Linux is simple. The following command is sufficient

curl -fsSL https://get.pulumi.com | sh

a first Project

az login or Service Principal

To be able to push the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Code to Azure you need to be authenticated on Azure AD. The following two options are available for that purpose:

• az login
  recommended to run the Pulumi CLI locally (in a developer scenario)
• a Service Principal
  recommended for team environments, particularly in CI

I have chosen to use a Sevice Principal. Read in Azure Docs on how to setup one yourself.

setup your 1st project

Create a directory

mkdir my1stPulumiProj
cd my1stPulumiProj

execute pulumi and follow the dialog

pulumi new

complete the config for the Service Principal

pulumi config set azure-native:clientId 06e35adb-xxx-zzz-aaa-abcdefghji
pulumi config set azure-native:clientSecret <<myVerySecretString>> --secret
pulumi config set azure-native:tenantId aaaaabbbb-cccc-dddd-eeee-ffffffffffff
pulumi config set azure-native:subscriptionId hhhhhhhh-iiii-jjjj-kkkk-llllllllllll
# to check these details have a look at the following file
more Pulumi.dev.yaml

execute virtualenv and activate it

cd ..
virtualenv -p python3 my1stPulumiProj/
source my1stPulumiProj/bin/activate

execute pulumi up

cd my1stPulumiProj/
pulumi preview
pulumi up

here you can see the few resources that are provisioned after "pulumi up" has been executed:

• a Stack at Pulumi
• a Resource Group at Azure
• and a Storage Account
  

Conclusion

that was it. With this simple setup, the first resources can be provisioned. In the next blog post I will discuss how to provision a VNet and additional resources in it. Stay tuned....