AWS announces new services and features at a relentless pace, and for infrastructure-as-code tools, keeping up is a perpetual race. Pulumi’s AWS Native provider, however, has a unique strategy for tackling this: it aims for same-day support for new AWS resources.
Let’s see this in action. Imagine AWS releases a brand new service, "QuantumLeapStorage," with a resource type aws:quantumleapstorage:Bucket. Pulumi’s approach means you could, in theory, write and deploy this resource within hours of its public availability.
Here’s a simplified Pulumi program that might provision such a resource:
import pulumi
import pulumi_aws_native as aws_native
# Assume aws_native.quantumleapstorage.Bucket is available immediately
# after AWS announces the new service.
quantum_bucket = aws_native.quantumleapstorage.Bucket("my-quantum-bucket",
bucket_name="my-unique-quantum-bucket-name",
acl="private",
tags={
"Environment": "Dev",
"ManagedBy": "Pulumi",
})
pulumi.export("bucket_name", quantum_bucket.bucket_name)
pulumi.export("bucket_arn", quantum_bucket.arn)
This program, if aws_native.quantumleapstorage.Bucket is indeed supported, would define a new QuantumLeapStorage bucket with specific configurations. Pulumi’s engine would then translate this desired state into the necessary AWS API calls to create the resource. The pulumi.export lines make the resulting bucket’s name and ARN available after deployment.
The core problem Pulumi’s AWS Native provider solves here is the lag between AWS innovation and IaC tooling adoption. Traditionally, providers would have to wait for SDK updates, generate new resource schemas, and then release a new provider version. This process could take days, weeks, or even months, leaving users unable to manage the latest AWS offerings via code.
The magic behind same-day support lies in how the AWS Native provider is generated. Instead of manually defining each resource and its properties, Pulumi leverages AWS’s own API specifications. When AWS announces a new service or resource, its API definitions are often made public or are discoverable through AWS’s internal schemas. Pulumi’s build system can consume these API definitions, often in formats like OpenAPI or CloudFormation resource specifications, and automatically generate the corresponding Pulumi resource code. This generation process bypasses much of the manual effort, allowing for rapid updates.
The key levers you control are the standard Pulumi resource arguments: bucket_name, acl, tags, and any other properties exposed by the aws_native.quantumleapstorage.Bucket resource. These directly map to the underlying AWS API parameters for creating a QuantumLeapStorage bucket. The provider acts as a thin layer, translating Pulumi’s declarative model into the imperative AWS API calls.
What’s often overlooked is the role of AWS CloudFormation resource types. The AWS Native provider is deeply tied to the CloudFormation resource model. When AWS introduces a new service, it typically also registers a corresponding CloudFormation resource type. Pulumi’s generation process can often infer the structure and properties of the new resource directly from these CloudFormation definitions, which are maintained by AWS itself. This means Pulumi is essentially following AWS’s own internal blueprint for how these resources should be managed programmatically, rather than reverse-engineering them.
The next step in managing AWS resources with Pulumi would be exploring how to handle more complex inter-resource dependencies and advanced deployment strategies.