Joe Duffy on Infrastructure as Code - Episode 99

Jul 27, 2020

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This week’s guest is Joe Duffy, the CEO of Pulumi — a venture-backed startup in Seattle whose mission is to help developers and operators get their code to the cloud faster together. Prior to founding and leading Pulumi, Joe worked for Microsoft for a number of years helping them take .NET to open source. Currently, his main focuses are on Infrastructure as Code and Cloud Engineering.

In this episode, Jeffrey and Joe take a deep dive into Infrastructure as Code. As someone who has been pouring his brain into the problems around IaC, Joe shares what he has learned about IaC, how Pulumi resolves some of these problems, and how you can get started with Pulumi today.

Topics of Discussion:

[:38] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes.

[:48] About The Azure DevOps Podcast and Jeffrey’s offer to speak at virtual user groups.

[1:27] About today’s episode with Joe Duffy!

[1:46] Jeffrey welcomes Joe to the podcast.

[1:50] Joe shares his experience at Microsoft when .NET first became open source.

[3:50] Jeffrey and Joe reflect on the history of using .NET with the Macbook.

[6:05] Joe shares what he has learned about Infrastructure as Code throughout his career and the approach they took with solving the problem with Pulumi.

[9:09] How does Pulumi solve specific problems better than Azure ARM?

[11:53] Joe shares how he thinks about the different levels in Infrastructure as Code (which gets at the heart of how infrastructure teams and developers work together.)

[14:55] Joe dives into the Pulumi approach and what solutions they integrate with.

[16:26] Joe shares the solution they offer to developers who are looking to do standard things.

[19:07] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast’s sponsor: Clear Measure.

[19:32] How does Pulumi solve the problem of developers who have to do it all (i.e. both the developer and infrastructure side)?

[22:08] From an architecture perspective, what does Joe think is the best infrastructure to pick?

[24:18] Joe shares how they have approached the issue of database migration with Pulumi.

[27:42] Joe discusses changing a setting on your app service after deploying your application vs. the other problem of ‘I’m not actually changing my code, but I need to change the setting.’

[30:24] With DevOps now 10 years old, does Joe believe that the current state of the industry is where it will continue to live, or does he see another sea change coming?

[32:03] Joe breaks down the paid tiers in Pulumi.

[33:42] How Joe recommends getting started with Pulumi.

[35:18] Is there a way to debug and use desktop emulators locally?

[36:26] Jeffrey thanks Joe for joining the podcast!

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!

Jeffrey Palermo’s Youtube

Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events!

The Azure DevOps Podcast’s Twitter: @AzureDevOpsShow