In 2025, several trends will dominate cloud computing, driving innovation, efficiency, and scalability. From Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to AI/ML, platform engineering to multi-cloud and hybrid strategies, and security practices, let’s explore the 10 biggest emerging trends.
In the ever-evolving world of automotive technology, BMW has been at the forefront of innovation, seamlessly integrating software into the heart of their vehicles. As cars become increasingly complex, with a growing emphasis on connectivity, over-the-air upgrades, and brand-specific user experiences, the need for a robust and scalable software development approach has become paramount.
Enter the BMW Software Factory, a platform that aims to empower the company’s developers and provide them with a superior development experience. At the core of this initiative is the adoption of Pulumi, a modern infrastructure as code (IaC) solution that has transformed the way BMW manages its software ecosystem.
PulumiUP 2024 is just around the corner! It will be held on September 18th, starting at 8 AM PT | 15:00 UTC +0, and with over 5,500 engineers from all over the world already registered, this is shaping up to be the must-attend event for cloud professionals, platform engineers, and AI/ML enthusiasts alike. From entry-level engineers to tech executives, this event brings together professionals from companies of all sizes to explore the latest innovations and best practices in Cloud and IaC, Platform Engineering & DevOps, and AI/ML.
If you haven’t registered yet, now’s the time! Start building your schedule today, select the talks you want to watch live and on-demand and add them to your schedule.
The cloud promised to revolutionize your business.
Faster innovation. Lower costs. Unlimited scalability.
But for many companies, that promise remains frustratingly out of reach. Instead of accelerating product development, infrastructure has become a bottleneck. You and your team (DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering teams) are bogged down by:
You know there has to be a better way. A way to truly harness the power of the cloud and turn it into your competitive advantage.
The Java Language Architect at Oracle, Brian Goetz, author of Java Concurrency in Practice, has commented how declarative languages can be a double-edged sword:
HashiCorp’s infrastructure as code solution, Terraform, uses a domain-specific language (DSL) to declare cloud resources. Pulumi’s infrastructure as code solution, on the other hand, lets you choose from any number of modern languages – C#, Java, JavaScript, Go, Python, or TypeScript – or the industry-standard markup language YAML, to declare cloud resources. Although both Terraform and Pulumi are declarative infrastructure as code engines at their core, this fundamentally different approach to expression languages has significant consequences.
AI is impacting almost every industry today, and for good reason - we are seeing fundamentally new experiences being made possible across a wide variety of products, and a set of new AI capabilities that promise even more incredible change in the near future.
Software development is among the earliest and most prominent fields to realize the benefits of AI, evidenced by the rapid adoption of tools like Github Copilot which is now one of the most heavily adopted developer tools of all time. Developers are benefiting from an incredible increase in their productivity with better scale and faster time to market.
We’re seeing the impacts of AI in the cloud Infrastructure development space in two impactful and complimentary directions:
At Pulumi, we’ve already seen profound impacts from AI in both of these directions.
This is the third of a three-part series originally published on The New Stack. Read Part 1 and Part 2.
Engineers who modernize their Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi get two classes of benefits:
We’ve covered a fair bit of the first above, but have yet to scratch the surface for the second.
Many Infrastructure as Code solutions require that you explicitly manage something typically referred to as “state.” This state is an artifact produced that keeps track of what you think your infrastructure looks like, as defined by your Infrastructure as Code, so that it can be easily compared to what your actual infrastructure looks like. This is how diffs and updates can be done. Every Infrastructure as Code tool stores this infrastructure state, which is really just metadata about all the cloud resources, properties and dependencies. However, how much the tool exposes you to it varies.
This is the second of a three-part series originally published on The New Stack.
Following the first piece in this series, Infrastructure as Code in Any Programming Language, this walkthrough will show what it takes to get up and running with Infrastructure as Code. Everything we show will be done with Pulumi’s free and open source Infrastructure as Code SDK. You can also sign up for Pulumi Cloud. After discussing the basics of how to get going, we’ll then dive into some advanced use cases to show what you can do from there.
This is the first of a three-part series originally published on The New Stack.
Infrastructure as Code is a technology for automating the infrastructure for your cloud applications. If you’re an engineer, whether that’s developing a backend service or within a central platform team, it’s not just about writing application code. You’ll need to provision, update and perform other tasks associated with its supporting infrastructure, and that’s where Infrastructure as Code can help. Instead of manually pointing-and-clicking in the cloud console, which is unrepeatable and error-prone, or writing ad-hoc scripts, which can be tedious and hard to scale, Infrastructure as Code lets us, as engineers, use familiar techniques by just writing code.
Denis Willett is a software engineer at the North Carolina Institute of Climate Studies who works on the NOAA Open Data Dissemination Program. His work focuses on leveraging cloud technologies for the development of data processing and machine learning pipelines. Denis did his PhD in Entomology and Nematology at University of Florida and his undergraduate and masters work in Earth Systems at Stanford University. You can read his full bio here.
NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) makes environmental data freely and publicly accessible across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (Azure), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These data include near real-time satellite imagery, weather models, radar feeds, drought information, ocean databases, and a suite of climate data records among many others. This program supports more than 220 datasets and over 24PB of open data. Since its inception, the program has been growing rapidly, almost doubling in size over the past year.