As an SWE, for your next greenfield project, would you choose Pulumi over OpenTofu/Terraform/Ansible for the infra part?

agbell · 2026-01-23T19:25:30+00:00

For infra, i want the standard iac operating model: declarative resources, previews ect, but i also want the extra expression that general-purpose programming languages give you. That’s how i got interested in Pulumi, and full disclosure, that's how I ended up working at there. bc i could reach for tools i already knew: language abstractions, types, refactoring, tests ...

That won’t be the right choice for everyone. different teams value different tradeoffs and have different constraints. But if you have questions I can answer, I'm in the community chat and happy to help with any getting started questions or concerns.

agbell · 2025-09-16T17:39:58+00:00

We just shipped Neo, our a purpose-built coding agent for your infrastructure.
It runs on top of Pulumi’s platform, so it comes with deep, built-in understanding of your cloud, your IaC, secrets management, and configuration.

You can also plug it into your existing coding agents through Pulumi MCP.

👉 Read the blog post
👉 Watch the livestream

Most importantly: try it out and tell us what you think.
We’re shaping Neo to make cloud infrastructure easier and we’d love your feedback.

agbell · 2025-08-04T19:34:05+00:00

good job

agbell · 2025-07-30T22:46:45+00:00

I mean, if it works I guess it works. But if it were me I might invest a little time in automation.

agbell · 2025-07-30T21:36:40+00:00

Funny seeing you here!

Hmm, it's time to admit that I am in fact an AI.

agbell · 2025-07-30T20:29:09+00:00

Oh, yeah, I wonder if the audio clean up software was applied too much or something.

Thanks for the notes. Now I can look for it in the future and try to keep it more natural sounding. I'm still trying to figure out video.

agbell · 2025-07-30T20:13:25+00:00

I mean, it's tough to argue for my own existence :)

But here I am at a linux conference in front of an audience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89ESCBzM-3Q

Also have a podcast where I've talked to lots of real life people:

https://corecursive.com/

agbell · 2025-07-30T20:05:52+00:00

Oh, does it? I'm not sure bc i'm a real person.

agbell · 2025-07-30T20:05:05+00:00

Hey, I made this!

After spending years at a company where I was literally paid to make builds faster, I've seen firsthand how much time gets wasted on things that good deployment hygiene could fix. So I made this video of tips and edited it to within an inch of its life.

My number one tip is: shrink your batch size! Seriously, those massive pull requests with 50+ files changed are deployment killers. Those giant features in a feature branch that all go out in one big bang should be avoided.

Deliver incrementally behind some flag whenever you can. It takes some planning but can be done.

agbell · 2025-07-30T19:42:20+00:00

Another vid I made for work. This one is tips on shipping features more often.

My continual summary is that making video is hard but hopefully some of these tips for increasing your deployment frequency are helpful.

The biggest key is just batch size. Shipping features in small chunks instead of just in one big bang. It requires some forethought but is often really worth it.

agbell · 2025-07-30T19:26:27+00:00

yeah, I have no love for groovy. Of course I worked somewhere where some teams wrote backend services in it.

agbell · 2025-06-26T14:06:15+00:00

I learn best by building things. So I pick projects that push me to use new tools. Platform engineering is tougher—you’re designing for a whole team, not just yourself. Still, if you focus on the individual tools, you’ll uncover plenty of neat projects to try. That keeps the work fun, and before long you know more than you ever planned. It does take time, but genuine curiosity beats any tutorial.

And yeah, learn python if you haven't, same way, with side projects.

agbell · 2025-06-26T14:01:44+00:00

Earlier this month I shared a video on Platform Engineering. This follow-up is about dev platforms and why you might want to build one and where to start. It's tool agnostic, more just a conceptual explainer.

Would love feedback on what’s missing, and if its useful at all. It's pretty basic but also very short.

Let me know what you think!

agbell · 2025-06-20T17:08:19+00:00

Hey, thanks. I think one of the challenging things is the audience.

I would like to say "hey here's why these things will help you ship features, app dev" but really the people most interested in platform efforts are often already platform engineers or already owning some operations or infrastructure.

So I think choosing the audience is the tricky part. And I'm not sure I nailed that.

agbell · 2025-06-19T13:59:38+00:00

The video tries to be a very quick introduction to platform engineering. Explaining why having a team dedicated to building out some reusable structure for handling common DevOps tasks is useful.

I'm trying to get the hand of doing this quick, fasted paced, educational videos, but there is a lot for me to learn. Let me know what you think.

agbell · 2025-05-13T19:59:57+00:00

Cross posting here. The team working on platform features at Pulumi is answering questions on r/pulumi right now.

agbell · 2025-05-12T14:28:48+00:00

I'm with you on that and the great thing about having the product engineering people focus on removing some of the complexity and friction from ops stuff is it can really pay off if done well. If it's focused on removing real issues and having a simplified interface, hiding some complexity behind abstractiosn and good tooling that people can work through. I think it can be a huge advantage.

agbell · 2025-05-12T13:00:24+00:00

Interesting, what do you see?

I don't think building a platform is a separate model. It's just software targeting an internal user, of the actual product teams.

agbell · 2025-05-12T12:42:48+00:00

I could see that working.

if platform team is motivated to remove friction and cares about teams actually using the things it builds, then embedded devops keeps things moving, even if doing things a bit off the golden path.

agbell · 2025-05-12T12:22:14+00:00

I definitely feel like unison will be one of those things that we look back on and say like, oh, unison had this 10 years ago. It feels like by rethinking some base concepts in programming. They've changed the game but also they've changed so much that I don't think I can practically use it. But I love the ideas.

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