1. Docs
  2. Intro to Pulumi
  3. Cloud Providers
  4. Kubernetes Overview

Kubernetes Overview

Kubernetes is an open source project for running and managing containerized applications on a cluster of machines.

Pulumi is an infrastructure-as-code tool that exposes the Kubernetes resource API as an SDK, alongside other SDKs which span common cloud native utilities, cloud provider IaaS offerings, and their catalog of services - managed Kubernetes included.

Use Cases

The various SDKs allow Kubernetes users to leverage Pulumi for novel forms of cluster management, and deployment of app workloads to clusters. Users of Kubernetes and Pulumi can:

  • Instantiate IaaS resources and managed services from any cloud.
  • Provision managed Kubernetes clusters from the major cloud providers.
  • Provision self-managed (open source) Kubernetes clusters on top of raw IaaS resources or on-prem virtualization providers.
  • Create and orchestrate Kubernetes API resources for app workloads, in the programming language of their choice.
  • Manage real code instead of YAML, JSON, DSL’s, or tar archives of templates.
  • Apply standard software development practices to Kubernetes applications, including the use of functions, classes, loops, conditionals, etc.
  • Increase productivity using the power of dev tools such as IDE auto-completion, type & error checking, linting, refactoring, and testing frameworks to validate Kubernetes clusters, app workloads, or both.

Getting Started

The quickest way to get started with Kubernetes is to follow the Get Started guide.

Library Packages

For Cluster Management

The following SDKs are available to work with IaaS resources, and managed or self-managed Kubernetes clusters.

The packages are available in Node.js (Javascript and Typescript), Python, Go, and .NET.

Extension Packages

For Workload Management

The pulumi/kubernetes SDK is available to work with, and deploy app workloads to running Kubernetes clusters:

Extension Packages

Crosswalk for Kubernetes

Pulumi Crosswalk for Kubernetes is a collection of industry standard best-practices for managing Kubernetes, and its infrastructure in production.

Get started by deploying stacks of infrastructure architected to enable teams to run and manage Kubernetes in production.