Thanks, and welcome!

First, I’d like to thank you for purchasing this early, in-progress edition of The Pulumi Book. I’m excited to be able to share it with you as I work on it, and I appreciate your willingness to come along on the journey with me. Buying a book before it’s actually done certainly qualifies an act of faith, so I promise to do my best to make it worth your time and investment.

The goal of this book, of course, is to teach you how to use Pulumi. This, by itself, will be no easy task, largely because Pulumi itself won’t seem to stop growing. When I wrote the first draft of this book, for example, many of Pulumi’s most interesting features weren’t even ideas yet; you could get a lot done with the the product back then, sure, but there was also a good chance you’d end up having to pull in another tool at some point to get your real-world work done.

Secondarily, though, my goal is to enable developers. T

and with as an infrastructure automation and at large, and . The thing itself is quite a moving target. Fortunately, though, the fundamentals have remained quite stable, so most of my work To teach you Pulumi from the ground upIn this book, you’ll learn Pulumi from the ground up by writing a number of practical applications in TypeScript and deploying them on Amazon Web Services. We’ll start simple at first to get you acquainted with the fundamentals — core concepts and features, that sort of thing — so you can develop a good mental model of how it works and how to use it. Then, in parts two and three, you’ll apply that knowledge in some real-world scenarios, and by the end of the book, you’ll be comfortable using Pulumi to manage your own projects. Along the way, you’ll build everything from static websites to serverless applications, containers and microservices, relational databases and key-value stores, CI/CD workflows, custom components, and lots more, all the while building an understanding of Pulumi It’s going to be fun.

But it’s also a challenge because not everyone’s looking for the same thing in a book like this.

To cover all this ground, though, you’ll need to be comfortable in at least one programming language, preferably JavaScript. If you haven’t quite mastered JavaScript yet, that’s probably okay; anything object-oriented and C-like syntactically would probably suffice. But in the interest of keeping the focus on Pulumi, I won’t spend a lot of time explaining loops, promises, closures, or the many nuances and idiosyncrasies of the JavaScript language. If you’ve written a typical web application with Node.js and a framework like Express, though, you’ll do fine. And if you’re totally new to the cloud and AWS, don’t worry — you’ll learn all you need as you go.

I mentioned how happy I am to be able share this book with you now, but I’m even more excited for what you’re about to learn. In addition to helping you work more happily and effectively with the cloud, there’s a good chance Pulumi will fundamentally change the way you think about composing and delivering software; it’s the one tool I wish I had when I began my own journey into the cloud a decade ago, and my hope is that it’ll have as much of an impact on your own work as it has on mine.

Thanks again, and be sure to share your comments, questions, and suggestions for improvement in the reader forums at https://community.leanpub.com/c/pulumi. You can also reach me by email at chris@nunciato.org or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/cnunciato.

Have fun!

Christian Nunciato chris@nunciato.org