Preview status

[praneetloke]

First off, the purpose of this issue is to only serve as a documentation. I appreciate that the Render team has put in hard-work to get a REST API out while experiencing tremendous popularity within the developer community.

ℹ️ For clarity, the term API refers to their publicly documented API.

The API currently does not have feature parity with what you can do their Console as well as with their own Blueprint IaC. It's missing some key features.

The API is also outright missing some resources that were introduced through the course of 2022. For example, managed databases and Redis are not yet supported, as well as build path filters in Services is also missing from the API spec.

I suspect that the Render team will prioritize updates to the API in 2023. You can help with prioritization by showing interest and upvoting related features on their Canny feedback site

Can I use this for production services?

The answer depends on the type of service you are wanting to deploy with Render.

There are two concerns:

• Render API coverage: If what is currently offered is enough for you, then go for it.
• Provider core: This provider is based on two libraries I've built to make authoring Pulumi providers for OpenAPI specs. One of them is https://github.com/cloudy-sky-software/pulschema. The other is https://github.com/cloudy-sky-software/pulumi-provider-framework which contains the runtime logic for the provider. While I am confident that you can use this provider for your production use case, it also means that you may experience breaking changes. The goal is to stabilize github.com/cloudy-sky-software/pulumi-provider-framework as more providers are created but that also means I might have to make some decisions that would end up introducing breaking changes in patch versions.

So why create a provider if features are missing?

Pulumi has a vast ecosystem of plugins. Plugins are core to Pulumi :) Don't think of this provider on its own. Think of what you can do by adding Render to the mix.

[praneetloke]

Just throwing this out there that the Cloudy Sky Software website is "mostly" deployed with this provider. I say "mostly" because of #101.

EDIT: As of v0.2.1, the website infra for Cloud Sky Software is completely deployed using this provider.

[elg0nz]

Hi @praneetloke just curious, are you still using this provider?
Would you consider it experimental or not?
The reason I'm asking is that we are happy Render.com users and would love to use Pulumi for configuration 🤓

[praneetloke]

Hi @elg0nz 👋 ! Thank you for reaching out. At this point, I'd consider the resources in this provider to be stable as I switched over to their official OpenAPI doc and use that as the source for generating the provider. The preview status is just because I want more usage of this provider to knock out any issues that may arise from broader usage that may be breaking changes. I use it for my own website's infra to serve as a simple example.

What you'll notice with this provider is that it is missing some resources right now and that's because Render themselves have not exposed the public APIs for those. For example, creating Postgres, Redis and env groups are not yet possible through the API, so you will not find those resources in this provider unfortunately. They are working on adding support for creating Postgres DB via the API though.

[elg0nz]

Amazing! Thank you for the update

[praneetloke]

@elg0nz no problem! Please feel free to open issues in the repo if you encounter any. Hopefully, it's a smooth experience!

[praneetloke]

@elg0nz Render has rolled out a massive update to the REST API that includes everything you can do with using the Dashboard. Stay tuned as I'll be updating this provider.