Get Started with Pulumi

Pulumi is a modern infrastructure as code (IaC) platform that lets you use familiar programming languages and tools to automate, secure and manage everything you run in the cloud.

Pulumi IaC is free, open source, and optionally pairs with Pulumi Cloud to make managing infrastructure secure, reliable, and hassle-free.

Why Pulumi

• Use a real programming language. Define infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java, or YAML — with loops, functions, testing, and full IDE support instead of a domain-specific language.
• See every change before it happens. Pulumi previews exactly what will be created, updated, or deleted before anything touches your cloud account.
• Keep your existing credentials. Pulumi has no credential system of its own — it uses the cloud access you already have, so there’s nothing new to set up or secure.

For the full story, see What is Pulumi?.

How getting started works

Getting started follows the same five steps on every cloud; only the provider details differ.

  flowchart LR
    A["1. Install the CLI"] --> B["2. Connect your cloud account"] --> C["3. Write a program"] --> D["4. Deploy"] --> E["5. Iterate and evolve"]

1. Install the Pulumi CLI. Install Pulumi with your operating system’s package manager or a one-line installer script. One CLI covers every cloud and every language.
2. Connect your cloud account. Pulumi authenticates to your cloud the same way your cloud provider’s own CLI does — if that already works on your machine, you’re done. See Connect your cloud account for how this works and how to set it up.
3. Write a program. Run pulumi new to scaffold a project from a template in your language of choice, then declare cloud resources as code.
4. Deploy. Run pulumi up to preview the planned changes and then apply them. Pulumi records what it created in a stack, an isolated, configurable instance of your program — see How Pulumi Works for the details.
5. Iterate and evolve. Change your code and run pulumi up again — Pulumi computes the difference and applies only what changed. When you’re done experimenting, pulumi destroy tears everything down cleanly.

Choose your cloud

Ready to begin? Choose a cloud provider and complete the full tutorial:

Coming from Terraform? See Pulumi for Terraform Users to use Pulumi alongside your existing Terraform infrastructure.

Learn more

The following sections are also useful when first learning how to use Pulumi:

Beyond IaC, the Pulumi platform also includes Pulumi ESC for centralized secrets and configuration and Pulumi Deployments for git-driven deployment workflows.