Startup Wing Cloud is hoping to remove some of the complexity for companies moving to a multi-cloud strategy by building an abstraction layer that allows programmers to write code once and deploy it on different clouds.
The company recently exited stealth mode with $20 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures, Grove Ventures and StageOne Ventures with participation from Secret Chord Ventures, Cerca Partners and Operator Partners.
Wing Cloud was co-founded by two cloud veterans. CEO Elad Ben-Israel is the creator of many open-source projects including the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and the CDK for Kubernetes while COO Shai Ber is a former software developer at Microsoft and founded Aniways, a startup that created a contextual monetization platform for instant messaging apps. Verizon bought Aniways in 2015.
“You want to write code once and deploy it on different clouds and segment your applications and divide them between clouds,” said co-founder Ber in an interview with Silverlinings.
That’s why the company is developing Winglang, an open-source programming language designed for building distributed systems that can leverage cloud infrastructure. The Winglang compiler produces a ready-to-deploy package that includes both infrastructure-as-code definitions for Teraform, CloudFormation and other cloud provisioning engines, as well as Node.js.code, which is designed to run on compute platforms such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes or edge platforms.
Ber said that Winglang doesn’t need any input from the major cloud providers like AWS or Microsoft Azure because it runs in the abstraction layer above the cloud SDKs.
Eric Newcomer, principal analyst and CTO at Intellyx, a technology analysis firm, said Winglang takes a step back and abstracts the services. “If you find yourself in a multi-cloud [environment], this will help you get your job done much faster,” he said.
Newcomer added that the major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure each have their own differentiated language for configuring their services and while some independent languages do work across multiple products, developers still have to code scripts independently for each provider.
Ber said the company decided to open source Winglang because it’s a programming language and developers expect the programming languages to be open source. Plus, developing a new programming language is a big job and Wing Cloud wants input from others.
“We expect that the community can influence the direction of the language,” Ber said, adding that anyone from the community that wants to add cloud or provisioning services can get involved.
Cloud big leagues
Ber described Winglang as the foundation layer for Wing Cloud, which is a commercial company that plans to make products that aid companies with the multi-cloud transition and can be monetized. “We want to help developers and DevOps use the cloud more easily,” he said.
That’s where this new round of funding comes in. Ber said that Wing Cloud will use the funding to expand its commercial offerings. For example, the company has already created the Wing Cloud management tool that is currently in private beta. This management tool is intended to help companies manage a multi-cloud deployment by providing an application centric view of the operations. It also allows developers to manage the application using a top-down view.
Newcomer said that many companies are using a model like Wing Cloud because it can offer additional features and capabilities beyond what’s available in the open source itself.
“It can be a very powerful model,” he said.
Ber said that right now the biggest threat to Wing Cloud is if companies keep using their same programming languages and tools for moving to multi-cloud instead of embracing Winglang. “New programming languages take a lot time to catch on,” he said.
Because of this, Wing Cloud is making sure its commercial products, such as the Wing Cloud management tool, are not totally dependent upon companies embracing Winglang. Instead, he said that companies can still get the benefits of the Wing Cloud management tool even if they are using a different language or a familiar SDK.
Wing Cloud is targeting the U.S. and Europe for its commercial products. The company has 16 employees and is not planning to expand its current headcount too dramatically, at least not until it has progressed further with its commercial products.