When you are writing Infrastructure as Code, you try very hard to stick to the providers and resources available in your chosen language, but eventually, most people will hit a point where they need to do something that they can’t do directly in their IaC language - run a script, execute an application etc. Most languages offer a feature to deal with this, Terraform has local/remote exec, and Bicep/ARM has deployment scripts.
One of the Infrastructure as Code tools I often talk about on this blog is Pulumi. I’m a fan of its ability to use real programming languages toe define infrastructure and the flexibility this brings to what you can do during a deployment. The benefits of Pulumi for developers who need to deploy infrastructure are clear, but for IT Pros, who maybe don’t have so much experience in using programming languages, it can be intimidating.
Pulumi allows you to use real development languages to create your Infrastructure as Code. Because of this, you will usually need several prerequisites and libraries installed in your development environment, depending on which language you are using. You can set these up on your development PC, but one alternative approach is to use GitHub Codespaces. GitHub Codespaces allows you to quickly deploy a pre-configured development environment, along with your code running as a cloud service.
