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Our last announcement was back in January when we announced the launch of a new Pulumi provider for Render. Well, it's time for another round of announcements!

Desktop App For Pulumi

Deskypus is a desktop application for Pulumi users who are looking to streamline their local development. Especially if you are using a self-managed backend for your Pulumi state and have to deal with multiple backend URLs! Deskypus gives you that missing UI so you can view all the details about your projects. Or if you working on multiple Pulumi projects, you might find yourself opening multiple terminal tabs to run various pulumi CLI commands to learn more about the projects.

But this is not a new app! This is the app's first minor version bump and it's because we believe in its purpose. For more than a year the app has been used under various situations. We've more recently added support for WSL too!

The new Pulumi Render provider allows you to create services on Render.

What Is Render?

In Render's own words:

Render is a unified cloud to build and run all your apps and websites with free TLS certificates, global CDN, DDoS protection, private networks, and auto deploys from Git.

Firstly, let me get this out of the way. There is no hard and fast rule or requirement for structuring Pulumi projects. Now that that's out of the way, let's look at couple of approaches and compare them with each other. Hopefully, you'll come out of this a bit clearer on what you want to do for your projects.

What Are Projects?

Projects are a grouping of stacks. You can have as many stacks as you want in a project. Projects define the runtime environment and other settings that apply to all the stacks contained within. There is no limit to the number of projects you can have in your account either. The project configuration settings exist in the Pulumi.yaml which will always be created regardless of whether or not you have per-stack configuration. On the other hand, the per-stack configuration file which takes the form Pulumi.<stack name>.yaml will only be created by the Pulumi CLI when you run the pulumi config set ... command for the first time for a stack.

The project configuration file is the entrypoint for the CLI to understand some basic things about your project. See the full configuration reference for Pulumi.yaml to learn about all the available options.

Best practices that every Pulumi developer should consider following in their Pulumi apps.

Stack Configuration

Pulumi provides first-class configuration management for your stacks. Use the commands available under the parent command pulumi config to set, read, and remove config properties. If you several config properties it is sometimes helpful to create a config structure in your codebase that exports all the properties in your stack config file. This is better than having config.get() or config.require() calls peppered all throughout your code. Just remember to use the --secret flag when dealing with secret stack config.

Avoid Direct Changes