Building a Development Environment for Cloud Engineering

Click on Original Article to see code examples.

Starting can be daunting. Before you take your first step, there’s a lot to consider, but you can prepare your development environment ahead of time to make your first steps in cloud engineering smooth and productive. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up your development environment to work across cloud providers, multiple languages, and different operating systems.

Building your toolbox

You might have heard of the French culinary term “mise-en-place,” which means laying out all the ingredients and cookware before starting to cook. That’s what we’re going to do here; layout all the accounts, authorizations, and software that you need to be a successful cloud engineer. We are going to need the following:

• A package manager: Every operating system has a package manager for installing software. Unlike binary installers, a package manager lets you manage all software packages, including updates. Package managers can help resolve dependencies, saving you from frustration.
• Cloud provider accounts: You can choose to set up one or multiple accounts. The important thing is how to configure credentials in your development environment,
• Programming languages: You can choose one or many, but they all have different versions and dependencies.
• Code editor: This is personal preference but make sure that it can perform code completion, error checking, and use enums. These features can be the difference between hitting

  Tab

  and searching through online documentation for a function.
• Pulumi: You can install Pulumi with a package manager and configure

Decisions

Before proceeding, you need to answer three questions:

• Which operating system to use for building cloud resources: macOS, Windows, or Linux?
• Which cloud provider are you using? This guide covers AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Which programming language will you use? Pulumi supports Node.js (JavaScript and Typescript), Python 3.6 or higher, Golang, and .NET (C#, F#, and VB).

Once you’ve made these choices, you can follow this guide in a choose-your-own-adventure style.

Package manager

Let’s start with the package manager. We’ll use it to install and manage all the software we need, including cloud provider CLIs, programming languages, editors, and Pulumi. Choose your operating system below.

Setting up a cloud account

The first task is signing up for an account. Once you have that out of the way, the next steps are installing the CLI and configuring your credentials.

macOS

Windows

Linux

Choose a Programming Language

Pulumi supports Node.js (JavaScript and Typescript), Python 3, Golang, and .NET Core (C#, VB, and F#) languages.

Node.js

Python

Golang

.NET

Get a code editor

While knowing how to use vim or similar text editors is a worthwhile skill, you should use a modern code editor. Here’s a non-exhaustive list why you should use a code editor.

• Quickly navigating to a type
• Autocompletion when you can’t remember the names of all members by heart
• Automatic code generation
• Refactoring
• Organise imports
• Warnings as you type.
• Hovering over something to see the docs
• Keeping a view of files, errors/warnings/console/unit-tests and source code on the screen
• Running unit tests from the same window
• Integrated debugging
• Integrated source control
• Navigating to where a compile-time error or run-time exception occurred directly from the error details.

You can use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Xcode, or any one of JetBrains’ language-specific IDEs. Alternatively, you can use a lightweight solution with many of the features of an IDE. Popular code editors include Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, and Atom.

You can install some editors with brew.

Install Pulumi

Verifying your Installation

After installing Pulumi, verify everything is in working order by running the

pulumi

Next steps

Congratulations! You have a fully configured environment, and you’re ready to jump into cloud engineering. You can maintain your development environment using the package manager to add or update your toolset. Your code editor provides a modern development platform that takes advantage of all the advances in software engineering. Your coding experience will be more productive and less frustrating.

What are the next steps? Begin with Pulumi’s Getting Started. You can skip the configuration sections and jump straight into your first project. Once you’re done with your first project, try out example projects on Github. You can start with simple projects using the

pulumi

This command will download the project from Github, create a virtual environment and activate it, and download all the python package dependencies. You’re ready to go and deploy with

pulumi up

You can use the examples as a starting point for building your cloud infrastructure and add resources documented on Pulumi’s API reference and Guides.