Pulumi launches IDP to speed secure cloud infrastructure delivery

Pulumi has introduced Pulumi IDP, a new internal developer platform designed to accelerate cloud infrastructure delivery for organisations.

Pulumi IDP is built on the company's open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) technology and caters to organisations seeking to deliver cloud infrastructure at scale. According to Pulumi, the product allows engineering teams to move from initial ideas to cloud deployment within minutes, while embedding security, compliance, and organisational controls into the process.

The company stated that Pulumi IDP has been developed based on insights from a customer base of over 3,500 organisations and 350,000 users. Many customers have independently built internal developer platforms, leveraging Pulumi's IaC platform. Pulumi IDP aims to consolidate best practices from these implementations into a single, complete platform for software delivery with built-in security and governance.

James Forcier, Staff Software Engineer at CLEAR, commented on the platform's development, saying, "We've spent a lot of time building our internal developer platform. We moved from a lower-level Terraform and HCL-based interface to Pulumi, letting us use a custom, higher-level, and much simpler-to-use YAML schema we've defined. We've made cloud infrastructure really easy to use for our developers."

Gartner has predicted that 80% of large organisations will adopt internal developer platforms in the coming two years. Pulumi IDP seeks to balance a flexible approach that enables developer self-service with guardrails and structure provided by platform teams.

The platform allows teams to codify and enforce organisational best practices, publishing reusable infrastructure patterns as components, templates, and policies in a private organisation registry. This registry supports infrastructure definitions in TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java, or YAML, and includes features such as built-in documentation, search, semantic versioning, and usage tracking.

Developers, data scientists, and other users can use Pulumi IDP to provision and manage cloud infrastructure through multiple interfaces: a no-code user interface, low-code YAML-based CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code in their preferred language, or via a REST API. Projects can be grouped into 'Services', which serve as logical containers for infrastructure, configuration, secrets, documentation, and observability dashboards. Example use cases for Services include web applications, microservices, Jupyter notebooks, and data pipelines.

Pulumi IDP also addresses ongoing operational needs, supporting activities such as drift and policy detection, remediation of non-compliant infrastructure, auditing of outdated components, and change management during version upgrades. The platform features approval workflows to maintain organisational oversight and a new visual import tool for onboarding existing infrastructure into Pulumi management.

An advanced identity and access management system underpins Pulumi IDP, providing least-privilege access via custom roles, permissions, fine-grained access controls, and integration with SAML/SSO identity providers. These security features extend Pulumi's existing enterprise security foundation to support compliance requirements.

Pulumi IDP is available both as a managed SaaS offering and a self-hosted solution for organisations with complex compliance needs. It integrates with other Pulumi enterprise capabilities including Pulumi Copilot for AI-driven infrastructure management, Pulumi Deployments for workflow automation, Pulumi CrossGuard for policy enforcement, alongside a unified REST API and extensible data model.

Joe Duffy, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pulumi, outlined the platform's value proposition: "CTOs, CIOs, and engineering leaders tell us that the pace of innovation is faster than ever. To succeed, developers must move fast – without breaking things. Pulumi IDP is the cloud infrastructure platform modern teams have been asking for: infrastructure-first, multi-cloud, immensely powerful and flexible, with built-in security and full visibility and controls. It turns the cloud into a competitive advantage."

Supporting perspectives from industry partners reflect the importance of visibility and standard workflows across internal developer platforms. Zachary Cook, Senior Manager of DevOps at Modivcare, remarked, "By integrating Pulumi Policy as Code with Insights Account Scanning and our developer portal, we're achieving the holy grail for Platform Engineering: instant visibility and governance over legacy infrastructure that isn't yet defined in IaC, while also accelerating our path to production for new cloud-native projects."

Justin Cormack, Chief Technology Officer at Docker, highlighted synergies between the companies: "Docker makes software supply chains more secure by standardising build, packaging, and shipping containerised applications - core to any modern internal developer platform. Pulumi complements this by enabling platform teams to define secure, reusable infrastructure patterns. Golden paths are incredibly important to our customers, and we're excited that Pulumi makes it easier to create and adopt them. Together, Docker and Pulumi help teams streamline developer workflows and accelerate delivery from code to cloud."

Pulumi IDP is now in public preview and is free to use for Pulumi customers and community members. General availability and additional enterprise pricing are expected later in the year.