Pulumi today previewed a tool that enables DevOps teams to unify the management of environments, secrets and configuration (ESC).

ESC is designed to enable developers to define reusable environments that combine secrets from multiple sources, including Pulumi IaC, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud KMS, OpenID Connect (OIDC) Relying Parties, 1Password and HashiCorp Vault. ESC works with any cloud execution context or tool, including Pulumi, Terraform, Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions or Docker.

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Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy said multiple environments can be defined and composed together to make it simpler to provision cloud environments at scale and eliminate copy-and-paste errors. That approach streamlines a complex process that is fraught with opportunities for mistakes to be made, including inadvertently leaving secrets exposed in an application after it has been deployed in a production environment, he added.

ESC can manage both static and dynamic short-lived secrets, now considered a best practice for secrets management, in a way that can easily be audited, noted Duffy.

ESC can be run independently of Pulumi’s existing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool, or it can be integrated with the company’s identity and role-based access control (RBAC) tools. ESC includes deep integration with any SAML IdP, including Azure AD, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta and Google Workspace.

One of the primary reasons cybercriminals target cloud computing environments is because the developers that provision these services have little to no cybersecurity expertise. As a result, the probability a cloud service will be misconfigured is fairly high. As organizations add additional cloud services, it becomes more probable that mistakes will be made as developers programmatically invoke services in an unfamiliar IT environment.

Pulumi ESC is available for free as a public preview today with the intent to eventually offer multiple tiered versions, including a free offering and others with advanced Enterprise and Business Critical capabilities. The ESC client SDKs, CLI and plugins are all open source.

In general, Pulumi has been committed to an open source strategy that clearly defines what capabilities are going to be freely available versus those that can only be found in the other available tiers of service, said Duffy. One of the issues that too many open source software companies encounter is that they can’t generate enough revenue from subscriptions and services to sustain themselves, he noted. Pulumi, in contrast, has been squarely focused on providing additional capabilities that can only be found in its commercial offerings and provide enough value to warrant licensing, said Duffy.

It’s not clear whether organizations are moving to change the way they provision cloud infrastructure and manage secrets. As the amount of scrutiny of software supply chain management increases, it’s now only a matter of time before those processes are, at the very least, reviewed. The challenge, of course, is that when it comes to how those tasks are managed today, there is a lot of cultural inertia to overcome before development teams adapt to a new approach to provisioning infrastructure and managing application secrets.