Thread by @ellism

Today is the day, @PulumiCorp comes out of stealth. So please indulge me as I spend a few moments talking about what pulled me away from Microsoft and .NET.

Pulumi is a new tool for managing cloud infrastructure. That sounds a bit meh, but it builds on one amazing idea 1/

The idea is "what if you used the same language and tools you use to define your application to define your infrastructure?" Put another way, what if you could "program the cloud"? What if making an AWS bucket was as simple as writing `new Bucket();` 2/

What if you could take all the tools and strategy you had for managing complexity in your application and could immediately apply it your infrastructure? You could build abstractions! You could reduce boilerplate and you wouldn't have to learn yet another bespoke tool 3/

As someone who has spent his professional life building tools and libraries for other programmers, the idea was immediately appealing to me. It just felt right when I looked at it.

the great thing is, that when you can build abstractions, the world is your oyster 4/

If you want to write a simple serverless API, you can build an abstraction that lets you write `new API(() => ... );`. Don't like the shape of that abstraction? No problem, its just code in your favorite language all the way down, so build one that makes sense to you 5/

Or, even better, leverage an existing abstraction someone else wrote just like how you leverage a package from NuGet. Build on the shoulders of giants.

One of my favorite examples in Pulumi is this one: github.com/pulumi/example…. 6/

The thing I love about this example is how the code you write looks like exactly what you'd want to write. It doesn't feel like a distributed system of micro-services. Someone else built the abstractions and I can leverage them to do what I want. 7/

Pulumi is most exciting to me because it enables these abstractions that let me build these ~50 line programs that do cool things with the cloud, without any real cognitive overhead. The app looks like how you'd expect it to look. The ceremony around infrastructure fades away 8/

So, I'm glad Pulumi exists, if only for selfish reasons. It provides me with a thing that makes me feel empowered to build cloud stuff, which is really fun.

So, when you have some free time, take a look at pulumi.io. 9/

Even if you don't use it (I hope you do), I think you'll find the approach interesting. If you're like me, maybe it will make it easier to start dipping your toes into the world of Cloud. 10/10