GeekWire’s startup coverage documents the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene. Sign up for our weekly startup newsletter , and check out the GeekWire funding tracker and venture capital directory .The path from successful startup to big deal in the tech industry can be foreshadowed with one key prize at the GeekWire Awards: Next Tech Titan.Five startups will be vying for the title in this category — which is presented by Baird — at our annual event next month. They are: Echodyne, Pulumi, Read AI, Statsig and Truveta.The GeekWire Awards recognize the top innovators and companies in Pacific Northwest technology. Finalists in this category and others were selected based on community nominations, along with input from GeekWire Awards judges. Community voting across all categories will continue until March 23, combined with feedback from judges to determine the winner in each category.We'll announce the winners on April 30 at the GeekWire Awards, presented by Astound Business Solutions. There are a limited number of half-table and full-table sponsorships available to attend the event

In addition, Pulumi has integrated with External Secrets Operator, a tool for managing secrets that runs natively on a Kubernetes cluster.

Pulumi has introduced a new operatingSystem property for node groups to facilitate this choice.