Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) is making its way into traditional Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools and various companies are incorporating this technology into their products. Pulumi, a cloud services vendor, is the first to include this feature and has this week launched their new Pulumi AI module. The machine learning model, ChatGPT, is behind the language model (LLM) utilized by Pulumi and can generate code from natural language prompts. Pulumi Insights also uses the vendor’s knowledge graph of customers’ cloud infrastructure to display alerts and recommendations accessed via natural language.
Meanwhile, a startup called FireFly has already rolled out their Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure-as-Code Generator (AIaC). FireFly’s AIaC can generate code from natural language prompts for multiple cloud providers like HashiCorp’s Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes Helm charts, and Dockerfiles. These projects focus on making IaC more accessible and easy-to-use so that even a less experienced DevOps engineer has the ability to build proficiently.
GitHub’s Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer are also attempting to make IaC more accessible by being able to generate resources like S3 buckets using AI. The use of generative AI reduces the need of skilled and experienced DevOps engineers and makes cloud deployments less of a mess with its multi-cloud abilities.
At the same time, this technology brings up the same potential risks it brings for applications. It is important for companies to understand their users’ needs and the type of coding they are interested in writing when creating these tools. As always, these types of tools should be used with caution and if possible, developers should always double check the code generated by the AI before deploying.
Pulumi is a cloud services vendor offering modern cloud infrastructure as code, offering solutions to assist with all aspects of software development, cloud operations, and application deployment. They are based in Seattle, Washington and have customers around the world. Their Pulumi AI module combines their knowledge graph of customer cloud infrastructure with ChatGPT to generate Infrastructure-as-code from natural language prompts.
This new development is spearheaded by Andy Thurai, an analyst at Constellation Research. His observations about the potential of generative AI for IaC are accurate, as this technology has indeed taken the software development world by storm. In his analysis, he also highlights the need for IaC solutions for multi-cloud deployments, which this technology can fulfill.
