AWS Lambda supports a variety of ways to get code and dependencies up and running in the cloud. You can use Lambda layers, custom runtimes or for ultimate control just specify a full container definition and push that up to ECR/Docker Hub for use by the Lambda platform. However, as flexible as Lambda is, there are two approaches that stand above the rest as "drop-dead simple". You can write your code in the browser with the built in editor, but let's be honest that isn't the best development experience, or you can zip your assets up locally and push them to the cloud. This is of course provided that your assets/dependencies are less than the 50MB cap at the time of writing this post. The remaining content of this post will focus on the zip deployment approach and problems you can run into when working on a Mac/Windows environment which most professional developers are likely to spend the bulk of their time in.

Pulumi is a powerful infrastructure as code (IaC) tool with a fantastic superpower you just don't get with products like HashiCorp's Terraform. You can harness the power of your favorite programming languages and apply them for another purpose. Rather than learning a domain specific language (DSL) that is largely a "one-trick pony" you can make your favorite programming language build cloud infrastructure! How cool is that? HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), while powerful, is frankly used for one thing and one thing only, infrastructure. It can do the job well, there is no argument we have gotten our mileage out of this tool and tools like it (I am looking at you AWS Cloudformation). However, it immediately starts to break down as you get more sophisticated. Looping, conditionals, etc. while supported have largely been bolted on as customers started to hit the edges of this tool chain. Which begged the important and maybe obvious question, "Why are we forcing ourselves to use a language not designed for this level of sophistication, when we have world class languages that would certainly be up to the task?" As a result, I would argue another wave of IaC tools was kicked off with players like AWS launching their Cloud Development Kit (CDK), Pulumi launching a cross-cloud/cross-service SDK and even HashiCorp recognized the need to grow past HCL. I will leave the reader to investigate the merits of each toolchain, as this was not the intent of this post. Today I want to introduce the Pulumi stack concept and the flexibility it can provide in building our cloud infrastructure.

You may have noticed the blog went down recently. I have been working on a new design and re-launch that took a touch longer than anticipated. Thank you for returning. I am hoping to have a more robust solution available to write/publish content more easily now.