Pulumi Corporation announced the launch of its open-source cloud development platform on Monday, marking the Seattle startup’s attempt to democratize access to the cloud and become the go-to platform for cloud-based app and infrastructure development.
The platform allows developers and DevOps teams to build and manage cloud-native software that uses containers, serverless services like AWS Lambda, APIs and infrastructure in one place. Pulumi calls the collection of features its “CoLaDa architecture.”
Pulumi was founded in 2017 by Joe Duffy, a veteran of Microsoft’s developer division; Luke Hoban, who worked on product definition and business planning for Amazon Web Services; and Eric Rudder, another Microsoft alum.
“All developers are now cloud developers,” Duffy said in a statement. “The cloud delivers enormous capabilities, however creating modern cloud software is still too difficult and requires specialized skills. It lacks a true programming model with the same familiarity and productivity that developers know and love when creating traditional applications.”
Pulumi hopes its platform will become that programming model. Pulumi allows developers to build apps and infrastructure in a variety of languages, including JavaScript, Python, TypeScript and Go, and will soon add Java and C# to its repertoire. It also allows developers to build services across most major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes and the Google cloud platforms, and enables users to share code across clouds.
The open-source platform is available on GitHub and essentially provides a framework to help developer teams quickly and efficiently put their code in the cloud.
Along with the platform launch, Pulumi also announced that it has raised $5 million in seed funding from Seattle venture capital firms Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital. Madrona’s S. “Soma” Somasegar will join Pulumi’s board of directors.
In the statement, Somasegar said the use of containers and serverless computing had become increasingly common but provides an additional level of complexity in bringing technologies together across clouds.
“Pulumi’s platform and suite of tools enables developers and teams to shortcut this complexity,” he said.
