Pulumi Deployments vs. Traditional CI/CD

Pulumi Deployments is purpose-built for infrastructure automation, complementing and enhancing traditional CI/CD systems like GitHub Actions or GitLab CI rather than replacing them. While simply calling the Pulumi CLI directly in these traditional systems is an option, Pulumi Deployments provides specialized infrastructure-focused functionality that works alongside your existing CI/CD pipelines, addressing the unique needs of infrastructure management that general-purpose CI/CD tools weren’t designed to handle.

Key Differences

Stack-centric vs. Repository-centric

Traditional CI/CD: Typically organized around repositories and branches. Workflows and configuration are usually tied to a specific repo structure or branch strategy.

Pulumi Deployments: Organized around Pulumi stacks, which represent environments or deployment targets. Deployment Settings are configured per-stack, not per-repo or per-branch, giving you more flexibility in how you structure your infrastructure deployments.

Multi-stack Orchestration

Traditional CI/CD: Designed primarily for linear application deployments, where a single build artifact moves through environments sequentially.

Pulumi Deployments: Built to handle complex multi-stack orchestration patterns common in infrastructure deployments:

• Create complex dependencies between stacks
• Handle parallel deployments across multiple environments
• Deploy a shared infrastructure stack followed by multiple application-specific stacks

Infrastructure State Management

Traditional CI/CD: Generally stateless, focused on building and deploying application code with state defined elsewhere (e.g., a database).

Pulumi Deployments: Deeply integrated with Pulumi’s state management system, understanding the nuances of infrastructure state:

• Preview changes before applying them, which is critical to understanding the full impact of changes in Pulumi code
• Provides built-in drift detection and remediation, scheduled deployments, time to live duration on stacks, review stacks (ephemeral environments)

Event-driven Architecture

Traditional CI/CD: Primarily responds to source control events like pushes or pull requests.

Pulumi Deployments: Has the flexibility to handle more than just source control events:

• Deploy via a REST API
• Trigger deployments based on time schedules
• Coordinate deployments between dependent stacks
• Enable user-initiated deployments through the UI

Using Deployments with Your Existing CI/CD System

You don’t have to choose between Pulumi Deployments and your existing CI/CD system - they work well together. Many teams configure Pulumi Deployments on their stacks and then trigger deployments via their existing CI/CD workflows.

This approach gives you:

• Access to specialized infrastructure operations and the Pulumi Cloud UI
• Consistent infrastructure state management
• The familiarity of your existing CI/CD workflow
• Advanced capabilities like drift detection and management of dependent stacks

As Pulumi adds more capabilities to the Deployments Platform like enhanced drift detection, TTL stacks, and ephemeral environments, you’ll automatically benefit from these features while maintaining your existing workflows.