Joe Duffy is the Founder and CEO of Pulumi, a startup in Seattle. Pulumi's cloud engineering platform helps developers and infrastructure teams collaborate to build, ship, and manage modern cloud applications and infrastructure. In this episode we talk about Joe's past work at Microsoft, what is Pulumi and how it benefits its user base and a heartfelt and wonderful story about the Pulumi name.
Timeline/Topic
00:00 - Opener/Sponsors
00:11 - Introduction to Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy
00:27 - Joe's Journey from early career to Microsoft to Pulumi
02:27 - What is Pulumi and what does it do?
04:14 - Pulumi being used in incredible and innovative ways
07:54 - Joe Explains the name and a very heartwarming story about Chris Brumme an early advisor
10:02 - What is the reason to use Pulumi over other tools
12:34 - Whats coming up for Pulumi
14:27 - Open Source to Commercial and embracing the community
16:05 - What work is Joe most proud of.
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Episode Links
Pulumi page https://www.pulumi.com/
Get started with Pulumi https://www.pulumi.com/docs/get-started/
What is Infrastructure as Code - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f8KF6UGN7g&t=102s&ab\_channel=PulumiTV
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- [Announcer] This episode of the POPCAST is brought to you by these sponsors.
- Hello everyone and welcome to the POPCAST. I have an old friend, we met up in New York, we had some drinks and cocktails and we had some fun. This is Joe Duffy, he's the co-founder and CEO of Pulumi. Hi Joe.
- Hey Dan, thanks for having me.
- It's a pleasure, again, part of the fam. So let's talk about the beginnings of your career. How did you get into development all the way to starting Pulumi?
- Yeah, so I, I was fortunate enough to have a friend earlier when I was a young teenager who had a computer and I got into programming as some other folks who just wanted to have fun building games and things like that. But I started my-
- Sorry, was it a Commodore 64? Come on, was it a Commodore or was it a-
- No, no. It was a little bit late to the party. I think it was like a 386, like IBM PC, something like that. Another friend of mine had a Tandy as well, which was fun, I remember playing Joust on that.
- Joust was awesome.
- But I, I learned to program with C as my first programming language, which I don't recommend. I think to the young mind, the very concept of pointers is literally mind-bending, but in hindsight, it was probably a good foundation to build on top of. But yeah, so my first foray into making money doing software was, I did start a small consulting business when I was in high school. This is around the time that the Internet became a thing. So there were a lot of businesses that wanted websites and e-commerce and stuff like that. So that's actually how I got started, which was fun. Actually, that's when I picked up like the entrepreneurial spirit of like, it's a little bit of sales, a little bit of marketing, a little bit of a customer support, engineering. But at some point I, you know, I ended up going to Microsoft and that was really formative for me, that was, got to see the software innovation at a completely different scale. Really, some of the best engineers I've ever worked with in my career, some of the best leaders, I learned a lot. Really obsessed with developer productivity, and that's where I sort of got the itch of, you know, that's what drives me now to this day is making people more productive in their, in their own jobs, helping them build things they never even dreamed were imaginable. And that's ultimately what led to founding Pulumi as well.
- So explain to us in like one sentence, you know, in terms of, somebody who's never heard of Pulumi before. What is Pulumi and what does it do?
- Yeah, so, that background of mine that I mentioned, you know, the cloud, I was really excited about the cloud and the capabilities of being able to ship software faster and build distributed architectures more easily. And, and yet what I, what struck me in my position at Microsoft was not many developers really thought of the cloud as a first-class thing that they should care about. A lot of them were used to writing simple applications, throwing them over the wall and then having their infrastructure teams provision virtual machines or databases, and, they didn't feel like the cloud was part of their architecture. So Pulumi is basically a cloud engineering platform that's enabling developers to use the cloud in a first-class way, while at the same time, allowing infrastructure teams to apply engineering discipline to how they do infrastructure, with sharing and reuse, great editor experiences, refactoring, testing, all the things we know and love about software engineering, now applied to infrastructure as well. And so this kind of helps both sides of the house work better together to really, you know, build cloud native software.
- [POP] Civo is an alternative to the big hyperscale cloud providers. They've launched the world's first managed Kubernetes service powered exclusively by K3s. With sub 90 second cluster launch times, a simplified Kubernetes experience, and predictable billing, Civo's on a mission to create a better developer experience. Get $250 free credit to get started, sign up today at civocloud.com/popcast, that's civo.com/popcast, go check them out. Without naming naming names, right? Like, is there like a practical, like you've said, wow, you know what, I, I started this. I'd never thought somebody would use my software like this.
- Yeah. Well, because Pulumi is a highly programmable interface to your infrastructure. You can literally do anything you can dream of. And so people do things like, you know, somebody who has a machine learning pipeline running an Amazon AWS, there are dynamically spot price bidding. And as soon as they find a lower price, they'll actually dynamically migrate the workload to lower, lower their spend on the fly. So they're actually doing infrastructure as code, but actually part of the way the distributed system actually works, never imagined that would, that would be possible.
- That's incredible, wow. That's again, super practical. And you think about that, you can pretty much, you know, using this like very intuitive language for deployments, configurations and, and, you know, on the fly. I mean, the sky's the limit pretty much, but what I liked about it was just looking like you can pretty much import any different module, any different, like, you know, application, it's like an SDK, to just for, I was blown away. But when, when you did that presentation in New York that I met you and I was just like, look, this is, he's the truth, man. What he's doing is the truth, like it's phenomenal. It's really cool.
- Yeah. And you know, I, I actually ran the languages teams at Microsoft when I was there, so I, I saw, you know, the power of programming languages and, you know, I was an early engineer on, you know, helped with the C-sharp programming language back in like the early two thousands. And I created a program language for a distributed operating system along the way at Microsoft as part of Microsoft research. And so I've seen the power of embracing programming languages, but also on the other hand, thinking of cloud infrastructure as, hey, we're building real distributed systems now. We talked about this in like the sixties and frankly, even fifties, right? There's so many research papers around the future of distributed computing. And well, it turns out, you know, the missing piece, the cloud is finally here. And I think it's just going to be a Renaissance of all these amazing things you can do when you start treating cloud infrastructure like software, and using great languages like Python and JavaScript, and Go, and you know, all the things we know and love about those.
- [POP] What you build and where it takes you, shouldn't be limited by your database. Cockroach DB helps developers build and scale apps with fewer obstacles, more freedom and greater efficiency. So you can forget about the database and trust that it just works. Kubernetes friendly, open source, and indestructible. cockroach DB makes it easier to build and scale apps. It gives companies the freedom to serve customers anywhere and it's backed by world-class documentation and excellent dedicated support. Discover cockroach DB, the most highly evolved and distributed sequel database on the planet, Kubernetes native and built from the ground up to help companies of all sizes, including Bows, Comcast, and Equifax, scale fast, survive anything and thrive anywhere, sign up for a free 30 day trial and get a free t-shirt at cockroachlabs.com/popcast. That's cockroachlabs.com/popcast. And they almost like a lingua franca of the cloud and infrastructure, and to me that means like, you know, and I'm not in marketing, I just do it, I just think of it like that, but, you know, and speaking of it, like in terms of the name Pulumi, I, I'm gonna put this in the liner notes of the episode because they think it's super important. So the, explain the, the name, how you come up with the name Pulumi.
- Yeah, so Pulumi means broom and Hawaiian, which when you know what the company does seem, semi-random, it turns out as of this morning, it's also the name of some new obscure, like mosquito or something, which they named after broom as well. But so Pulumi is broom and Hawaiian, and you know, we named Pulumi actually after a colleague of mine, Chris Brumme, as you notice, it's Brumme, not broom, but everybody always mispronounced his name broom. He grew up in Hawaii, and he unfortunately, he was advising the company, and was a great mentor of mine. He unfortunately passed away right after we started the company. He actually, we were at his house in Arizona, you know, my co-founder Eric and I, and he took us into a room and he sat us down and he said, you guys have to start a company on this, stop dilly-dallying just get it done. And then he passed away two months later, unfortunately. So we named it to honor him, he actually, I worked with him a lot at Microsoft as well on some of these distributed systems, and so, many, many years of inspiring us to get to where we got to, so it felt appropriate to honor him with the name.
- That's phenomenal, and again, it's like, this is what I love about what I do at my show, is like, you know, finding love, there's technical people, all the world, and you can talk about the releases and the languages and all this, but like what, ultimately people, you know, building these things and kind of the stories behind it is why I do this show is like, that's just such a noble thing you all did. And it's just phenomenal to honor somebody that's passed, so God rest your soul Chris Brumme.
- [Announcer] Learn how to operationalize open policy agent at scale with Styra. To get started, go to the link, att https://hubs.ly/H0pnkm20.
- So let me, riddle me this. So in terms of Pulumi, there's other tools like, you know, you're going to hear people what people are listening to, things like Terraform, there's other ones out there, but what do you think is the unique thing that says, look, this is the reason why you should use Pulumi over other tools.
- You know, I think it's this belief that two things, one that developers are increasingly getting hands on with infrastructure, and developers are coming from a world of having IDEs and rich programming languages and package managers and all these things. And then at the same time, you know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel of all of these things we know and love, you know, we don't have to build bespoke module systems and test frameworks in it, and, you know, static analysis tools, we've got all of those things over in application programming, language land. So let's, let's leverage that let's not, let's not reinvent the next 20 years of like what we just went through with building all this stuff for programming languages. And so that's the key difference, instead of a Yammel based dialect, instead of a templating solution that spits out Yammel or, you know, domain specific language, all of which have their own, like all those things are fine. You know, I'm not, I'm not trying to say like, those are bad in some ways, just for certain scenarios, especially low levels of complexity. Like we invented these tools in programming language land to team complexity, right? Like my, one of our CTO, Luke, he founded the TypeScript project at, at Microsoft. And the reason that was invented was, man, JavaScript at scale just gets really complicated. And so TypeScript, by adding static typing, helps detain that complexity. And there's a lot of parallels with what's happening in infrastructure. You know, it's really easy to start simple, but once you scale up an environment, you've got, you know, a Kubernetes cluster, it's connected to, you know, it's running in a private VPC, it's got load balancers, it's got, you know, DNS, now you're maybe incorporating a CDN, and you've got containers and serverless functions, and now you're scaling it out to multiple environments worldwide. Like the level of complexity is just exploding in cloud infrastructure, and we wanna embrace and lean into that complexity. We don't, you know, that's powerful stuff, right? And I think language has helped us to, to tame that.
- Got it. Teleport allows engineers and security professionals to unify access for SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and databases across all environments. You can download Teleport right now at goteleport.com. That's goteleport.com. And in terms of like, what's, what's coming, what's the future, like, what are we, what do we have coming up like that You're like, I'm so stoked to be at Pulumi, and these are the things that I, I love that we're doing. Give me, give me, give me the, the, the folks that are watching or listening to this, like what, what cool things were, you know, are you working on?
- Yeah, so we started with the infrastructure as code because that's really, to me at, you said, lingua franca, I think is exactly right. We built this language agnostic cloud agnostic engine that can do infrastructure as code, but that's really the foundation of everything else we're building. And I think we're gonna, we're moving from just having an infrastructure's code tool to having a cloud engineering platform for the entire team that really helps the whole team collaborate and work together. So think of that as like, it's like, what GitHub did for, you know, code repos, but for infrastructure management. And that's really exciting. We're seeing many of our biggest customers are actually internally building their own platforms, using all these building blocks. And we're kind of like, Hey, you know, one of our customers, Snowflake for example, is doing this. And like Snowflake is a very innovative company, but not everybody can afford to spend all that time building their own internal platforms. Like, wouldn't it be better if we just had that out of the box, right? Like you can be as innovative as Snowflake, if you just use this kind of solution. And of course it's gonna be customizable, but that's really the direction we're going in. We're also trying to make it easier for developers. if you just wanna to get up and running with a simple container based architecture, the concept count of what you need to learn is still way too high. And so we've got some tricks up our sleeve that we'll be announcing in a couple months that are going to help solve that problem as well.
- Fantastic, and again, like it's leaps and bounds. 'Cause I saw, you know, I've seen early iterations of Pulumi and what it is now, because I was doing research, and, and so this is not only, it's obviously started from open source roots and I, you know, I just ran a Bash script and I was able to have, Pulumi me on my machine and I was playing with it before, but there's also a commercial element. Talk to me about the difference between the open source and the commercial elements.
- Yeah. So we knew from the outset that Pulumi had to be opensource. You know, it's really important to us that we embrace the community. Everything we do is community first, you know, one of the last projects I ran at Microsoft was open sourcing .net and taking it to Linux and Mac. And that was just like an amazing moment of, you know, the whole team, just eyes open to this bigger world out there, beyond just the walls of Microsoft, and, and so I knew Pulumi was gonna be open source, but at the same time, we wanted to make sure there was an honest and sustainable business model behind it, so that we can continue delivering all of that goodness to the community. And so that's why we have a SAS offering that helps you adopt Pulumi in your team. And it just helps with the things like, you know, sharing projects, applying policies to your projects, getting insights into like who changed what, and when, and, you know, searching over your resources. If you're trying to find that needle in a haystack, you know, there's a CloudWatch log somewhere. You just can't find it, you know, there's a lot of things value add that we can add on top of the open source, without, without having to hold back from the open source. So the entire SDK is open source, it's all there, standard license, Apache license. And so, so that's, that's kinda the, the overall approach, but you can use the open source without using our SAS. It's entirely optional. The analogy I draw is sort of like Git and GitHub, right? You can use Git entirely offline if you want, have at it, like share your repos in a zip file or a file share, but it's way easier to use in a team if you use it with GitHub, that's sort of the aesthetic that we were going for.
- Awesome. I'll ask you the last question, Joe, is what work are you most proud of?
- You know, I, I think Pulumi me is the thing I'm most proud of because, you know, seeing, first of all, building a great team, world-class team that embodies the values that we're seeing in the community of, you know, an inclusive environment where it's open and honest, collaborative, I mean, that, that, that is amazing, but I think seeing it solve some very important customer problems is what brings me the most joy, you know, we're, we're seeing entire companies that can do new things that they couldn't previously imagine. And it's having a big impact, you know, you look at a lot of our customers that are, they're the very ones where the cloud is part of their secret sauce, right. And, and Pulumi is a, you know, I'm not gonna claim that it's a, you know, more than 50% part of that, but it's a meaningful part of their ability to be successful. And that just feels absolutely amazing, to build something from nothing into that, it's been, you know, four years of a lot of fun, but you know, a lot of difficulty, like first year is me writing all the code, and the second year, it was me trying to hire a team, and like every, every month is different. But getting to this point, has been super fulfilling and super exciting.
- Again, everyone is listening and watching this fantastic product, fantastic company, fantastic leader in Joe, check them out, you know, Pulumi, you can it's Pulumi. check them out. There'll be obviously links in light of the episode of Joe, such a pleasure having you on the POPCAST. Finally, dude.
- Thank you so much for having me, someday, I'll be back up there in New York and we'd love to see you again in person, but meantime, thanks again, and thanks for listening.
- Thanks.