🐤 Pulumi Playground — A Cloudy Sandbox with a Yellow Chick

#devchallenge #pulumichallenge #github #api

This is a submission for the Pulumi Deploy and Document Challenge: Get Creative with Pulumi and GitHub

Hey there, cloud explorer! ☁️🐣

This is my submission for the Pulumi Deploy and Document Challenge, and it's called Pulumi Playground — your fun-sized cloud lab where you can spin up infrastructure stacks in seconds... and watch them disappear minutes later, like magic.

📦 Source Code: GitHub Repository
🛠️ Stack: Node.js, TypeScript, Pulumi CLI, Inquirer.js

💡 The Idea

I wanted to create a safe and playful environment where developers (especially those new to Pulumi or cloud infrastructure) could quickly test, prototype, and understand how templates work — without needing to write a full Pulumi project from scratch.

So I built the Pulumi Playground — an interactive CLI that lets you:

⚡ Choose from dozens of official Pulumi templates (like AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.)
🧪 Deploy stacks instantly
📂 Or load your own .yaml/.json config file
🧹 Automatically destroy the stack after 5 minutes

It’s fast, ephemeral, and friendly — just like a little yellow chick running around in the clouds. 🐤

🤖 How It Works

The app has a simple architecture using controller-service-view separation:

controllers/ handle user actions and flow
services/ abstract Pulumi logic (like stack deploy/destroy)
views/ manage the CLI prompts and UX
data/templates.list.ts stores all supported templates

Internally, it uses LocalWorkspace.createStack to bootstrap Pulumi templates on the fly. After 5 minutes, the stack is destroyed — keeping both your budget and AWS bill clean.

✨ Why This Is Fun (and Useful)

Pulumi Playground:

🐣 Makes it fun to learn and test Infrastructure as Code
🧼 Keeps everything clean with automatic teardown
🎓 Helps you experiment before committing to a real project
🪄 Has adorable branding and zero boilerplate

Whether you're:

A Pulumi newbie trying to learn the ropes
A cloud engineer experimenting with IaC templates
Or just a curious dev who loves 🐤 mascots

...this playground is for you.

🔭 What’s Next?

I’d love to extend this playground with:

🗃️ Tag-based template filtering (by cloud, language, etc.)
💬 CLI logs with emoji-powered feedback
📥 Support for user-defined templates
⏱️ Custom destroy timers
🐥 Even more duck-themed UI goodness

🧠 Final Thoughts

This was such a fun little project to build — combining my love of clean CLI tools, Pulumi’s powerful API, and a bit of feathered branding fun. 🐤✨

Pulumi Playground proves that learning cloud infra doesn't have to be dry or difficult. With the right tooling, it can be fast, secure, and even delightful.

Big thanks to the Pulumi and DEV teams for this challenge — I had a blast!

Let the chick play on. ☁️🐣