Enterprises are increasingly relying on cloud resources across a broad plane of infrastructure and managed service providers.

But this makes it all the more difficult to locate, manage and track resources across organizations, teams and projects.

“Oftentimes this results in the infrastructure layer working as a bottleneck that increases the lead time from ideation to delivery,” said KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, senior industry analyst at RedMonk.

This has given rise to infrastructure as code (IaC), which enables infrastructure management through coding rather than manual processes — dramatically simplifying the process for developers.

Pulumi, a six-year-old universal IaC platform, aims to take IaC to the next level with Pulumi Insights. Released today, the tool allows engineers to perform analytics and search across cloud infrastructure; generate infrastructure as code from natural language prompts; and create AI-driven infrastructure automation.

CEO Joe Duffy described it as “intelligence for your infrastructure as code.”

IaC is an API-driven way of using code to configure and provision infrastructure resources, Fitzpatrick explained. It is often juxtaposed with manual infrastructure processes.

“It has the ability to codify a workflow, which makes it repeatable and allows for the integration of infrastructure state into version control (thus making it more easily trackable),” she said. “It also enables developer-centric self-service.”

Forrester analyst Naveen Chhabra explained that, for developers, “it’s important to know that infrastructure can be consumed in a code-like manner.”

“At a very basic level, IaC is meant to deliver automation for infrastructure,” he said, which includes virtual machines, servers, storage and applications.

The benefit is speed: Developers can rapidly make changes to infrastructure, he said. They can start with basic infrastructure needs, then use the same code to write descriptions for needs down the line.

“At an infrastructure layer, they can make changes just by changing the code,” he explained. “The code is not very elaborate; (developers) just need minimum definitions, minimum specifications.”

He described it as providing a Swiss army knife to those who can make the changes the way they want. Other benefits include change control and consistency. “IaC can provide that consistency of environment,” said Chhabra.

The concept is still nascent, but rapidly gaining traction. According to one estimate, the global IaC market will grow from $.64 billion in 2021 to $4.45 billion in 2030, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%. Another prediction puts the market at $2.23 billion by 2027.

As evidence of this, a recent Cisco report found that 58% of organizations are adopting IaC. The critical outcome to adoption is improved security. IaC is also critical to helping manage complex applications, especially among organizations that use more than 10 public clouds. Other benefits include improved infrastructure consistency, more efficient development, faster time to market and increased workflow transparency, according to Cisco findings.

One of the biggest contenders in the space is HashiCorp, whose Terraform open-source tool enables infrastructure automation for provisioning, compliance and management of any cloud, datacenter or service. Other providers include AWS CloudFormation, Red Hat and Microsoft.

Pulumi, for its part, supports 100-plus clouds, including the big players AWS, Azure and Google; SaaS-based such as Snowflake and Cloudflare; and cloud native, including Kubernetes and Helm. The company’s more than 1,500 customers include BMW, Volkswagen, Lego, Petco, Snowflake and Pinecone.

Fitzpatrick noted that, at his point, IaC can still be a tough sell to organizations and practitioners rooted in more traditional infrastructure management processes.

“We see vendors in the IaC space still having to do a lot of education, but we also see a lot of efforts around making processes and tools easier to adopt,” she said.

Another trend is configuration management tools shifting towards IaC capabilities — with an emphasis on provisioning (and not just configuring) infrastructure.

In this sense, Pulumi says it is putting itself ahead with Pulumi Insights. Duffy explained that the company has a petabyte of data that provides it with a deep understanding of cloud infrastructure.

Pulumi Insights, which is powered by Pulumi’s cloud supergraph, has three key pillars: search, analytics and intelligence. That is, developers can find anything in any cloud; deep insights into cloud infrastructure with dashboards and export to data warehouses; and automation of infrastructure creation via AI.

Pulumi tapped into OpenAI’s ChatGPT to automate infrastructure provisioning tasks, Duffy explained. A PulumiGPT function can generate IaC, and an open-source CLI companion can manage infrastructure.

“AI is supercharging IaC capabilities here,” said Duffy. “You can provision infrastructure on the fly. It’s way easier than staring at a blank page. It’s super interactive.”

Pulumi Insights supports both structured query syntax and AI-powered natural language queries, he said, and users can find information on any single cloud or multi-cloud and perform organization-wide analysis on trends and usage. This can include total resources, breakdown by provider and resource type and resource usage over time.

The platform features advanced filters, sorting and customizations, and users can build custom reports and dashboards and import into other data lakes to join with other business data.

“Analytics is all about aggregating that data, turning into dashboards, gaining key insights,” said Duffy. “This really gives people unique insights into cloud usage and trends and instant insights into how they’re using infrastructure as code.”

For example, Pulumi built a SaaS product for managed Cockroach Labs databases. This resulted in more than 200X resources per engineer compared to the average traditional IaC user (with 0.1% to 10% the cost to manage).

“It’s giving people building blocks and enabling a huge breadth of scenarios,” said Duffy.

As Fitzpatrick noted, Pulumi aims to address issues with resource tracking and bottlenecking “by providing tools and processes designed to enable companies to analyze infrastructure as code resources and apply that knowledge to cost control, forecasting, security, and compliance.”

Pulumi has seen ways and patterns in which infrastructure has been provisioned across different cloud resources, and is looking to leverage it — along with recent AI innovations — to help users more easily and efficiently navigate a complex cloud infrastructure landscape, she said.

“With the functionality in this release, Pulumi offers insights into IaC resources across different infrastructure and managed service providers, and makes those resources searchable from a single place,” said Fitzpatrick.