Welcome!

First, I’d like to thank you for purchasing (or if you’re reading online, just choosing to spend your time with) this 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 as an act of faith, so I promise to do my best to make it worth your time and investment.

In 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 2 and 3, 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. It’s going to be fun.

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 will 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 to 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