Pulumi builds Crosswalk to ease AWS struggles

Pulumi builds Crosswalk to ease AWS struggles

Infrastructure as code company Pulumi has just released Crosswalk for AWS, a library collection meant to help with getting AWS deployments off the ground.

According to CTO Luke Hoban (who worked for AWS EC2 before), using “the building block services that AWS offers” is “still too hard” with setup times in the “days to weeks” rather than the “minutes to hours” category.

Pulumi Crosswalk for AWS has apparently been in the works longer than the company has been around (which is about a year) and was developed to tackle the AWS complexity issue. Hoban hopes it will not only help users to get to production faster, but also adopt AWS best practices while you’re at it.

To realise that, Crosswalk offers higher-level components that include “secure and cost conscious defaults” for the different platforms AWS supports (serverless and containers), and infrastructure patterns (e.g. security, networking, and monitoring).

Tasks that are supported by Crosswalks include things like setting up network isolation with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, introducing monitoring and alerting with Amazon CloudWatch, or adding access management functionality to AWS infrastructure. But it also helps with the bread and butter stuff such as creating container workloads on the Amazon Elastic Container Service or AWS Lambda if you’re more into serverless computing.

While other tools such as the Serverless Framework or eksctl do similar things for their respective domains, Crosswalk wants to target the entire AWS platform. It’s open source and free to use with the community edition of Pulumi, which is similar to HashiCorp’s Terraform if you’re looking for something to compare it to.

Looking ahead, Pulumi plans to bring Crosswalk to Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes, as well as keep simplifying features for the AWS cloud. There are also talk of launching support for Python and other programming languages, since Crosswalk is only supported in Node.js right now.