DigitalOcean droplet provisioning with Pulumi

The snowflake VM I run my experiments on has a serious flaw. I can't remember what I have installed there. It is embarrassing as some essential services to me run there.

As an enterprisey developer, my attention draws naturally towards IaC solutions for this particular memory issue. The code of the experimentations is in git, so why not the infra. Some would say it is a major overkill since we are talking literally about one domain running on the puniest DigitalOcean droplet. I say I have a weekend to spare on silly stuff.

The easiest choice is to write some Terraform. Yet come to think of it, is it still an obvious pick in 2022? I've never written anything too complex with it but having heard so much backlash against Terraform language, is it time for something new? The answer turns out to be a yes.

The IaC solution for me in 2022 is Pulumi. It has a catchy name, a base for a good dad joke for a Finn. Besides that, Pulumi has some attractive qualities to it.

It is declarative
I can write the code in TS or Go
I can store the state for free in their service

The actual Pulumi code is super simple in my case. I struggled somewhat with how to pass configs stored in Pulumi around. Here is a snippet of how to do that for a user data script (yes, this is old-school stuff)

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