Infrastructure-as-code company Pulumi Corp. said today it has created a new public registry where developers can discover and share Pulumi Packages that make it easier to build and deploy modern cloud applications.

The company said its collection of cloud architecture implementations and software-as-a-service integrations with best practices built-in will make it possible to apply the principle of “share and reuse” to infrastructure as code, helping to speed up software development.

Pulumi is a hot startup in the infrastructure-as-code market, selling open-source tools that help companies to automate the management of their cloud computing environments. The idea is to use code to provision and manage cloud infrastructure rather than doing things manually, in order to reduce hassle and save on time.

The approach has some merit as deploying an application on a cloud platform such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud can be quite complicated. Teams need to provision and configure the infrastructure resources the app will use, then define the security rules and set up the app’s individual components. These tasks are fairly laborious and are usually handled by writing code.

The problem is that each cloud platform requires developers to write these scripts in a niche programming language specific to one particular tool. So there’s a steep learning curve. What Pulumi does is it makes it possible to use standard programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go and .NET/C# to manage cloud infrastructure instead.

With the launch of the new Pulumi Registry today, the company is making it easier for developers to share and discover Pulumi Packages, the core technology that makes it possible to define cloud infrastructure resource provisioning more easily. Pulumi Packages can be thought of as cloud reference architectures provided in the form of software development kits, code samples and how-to guides.

As well as accessing ready-made Pulumi Packages, teams can use the Pulumi Registry to build components representing new cloud architectures that can then be reused or modified by developers as required. So, for example, an infrastructure team can build a component for deploying Kubernetes on AWS that automatically configures the availability zones, security groups, access roles and auto-scaling, while specifying the required resources. Developers can reuse that component for additional deployments later or tweak it as required.

Pulumi is trying to encourage the community-building aspect. It said users can create Pulumi Packages in one language and make them available in all languages if they publish them for reuse in the registry.

Pulumi Chief Executive Joe Duffy said the company is pushing a developer-first approach to building and sharing reusable infrastructure components both within an organization, and more broadly with the community. “By providing a place where teams can share and discover reusable infrastructure building blocks, the Pulumi Registry helps ensure that the simple things are simple and the really hard things are made possible,” he said.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE he thinks the infrastructure-as-code space is an important emerging area that enterprises are keen to exploit. “Sharing and reusing software is key for enterprises to achieve enterprise acceleration, which is best done with code,” he added.

The company said the Pulumi Registry includes native provider packages for AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure that were built in partnership with all three cloud providers. There are more than 60 Pulumi Provider Packages available for each cloud, for popular services such as SumoLogic, GitHub, DataDog, CloudFlare, Docker, Auth0, Snowflake, Kong, Spot by NetApp, MongoDB Atlas and many more. Also available are numerous component packages for deploying production-ready apps on Kubernetes, serverless architectures such as Amazon Lambda and databases such as AWS Redshift.

Al Sene, DigitalOcean Holdings Inc.’s vice president of engineering, said his company’s inclusion in the Pulumi Registry makes it easier for its customers to provision cloud resources. “Pulumi Packages lower the bar to adoption of cloud engineering best practices and help users ensure their cloud journey is as frictionless as possible,” he said.

The Pulumi Registry is up and running now, with each Pulumi Packages freely accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

Images: Pulumi