Running a multi-cloud strategy, using different cloud providers for different workloads, can help companies avoid vendor lock-in and allow them to use best-of-breed tools on different platforms. But the downside is that programmers have to write code to make their applications run on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
This is because every company connects to its services differently, forcing programmers to write three different sets of connectors.This is expensive and time consuming, but wing cloud The hope is to change that by building an abstraction layer that lets programmers write once and use the same code across all three cloud services.
Today, the company is out of stealth, announcing a $20 million seed round to build wingthe unified programming language for the cloud.
Wing Cloud co-founder and CEO Elad Ben-Israel, who has decades of experience as an engineer, said he saw many companies struggle with managing applications across clouds, and he wanted to build something to help with this very problem. challenging questions.
“We’re basically creating APIs that are common to all providers,” Ben-Israel said. Wing has been able to leverage common elements in things like storage and servers so that programmers can write it once and use it across these different clouds.The first thing this startup created was an open-source programming language called wing.
As described by Ben-Israel, Winglang is abstracting away the details of programming across these platforms for developers, making it easier for them to deploy wherever they need to. “The Winglang compiler produces a ready-to-deploy package that includes infrastructure-as-code definitions for Terraform, CloudFormation, or other cloud provisioning engines; and Node.js code designed to run on computing platforms such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, or edge platforms ,” the company said.
Ben-Israel said that while such tools have long been needed, the key is to combine the right time, right place with the right skills and understanding of the problem.
Before launching Wing Cloud last year, Ben-Israel was an engineer at AWS where he helped develop the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), a tool designed to help programmers more easily migrate applications to the cloud. The experience gave him a deeper understanding of what it takes to build a tool like Winglang to run not only on AWS, but other clouds as well.
The commercial version of the product, which is in private beta, will give companies a way to manage the operational aspects of multi-cloud deployments. It helps you manage applications through a unified model once you have deployed them across multiple clouds.
Ben-Israel said it was still early days and they were still working on a complex set of tools. That’s part of the reason the seed is so huge, because it takes some capital to build something like this, but the company sees signs of interest in the tool, such as a Slack channel with over 600 members, 1,300 stars on GitHub, There are 30 more users. -40 people from the community work with them on the open source project, which he says is a lot for such an early-stage tool.
The company currently has 16 employees, but with funding, it may add engineers this year. Ben-Israel said the general makeup of the engineering market is such that if he wants to appeal to a more diverse crowd, he has to do so consciously, and he’s trying to do that, even early on. At one point, he pointed out that the team was distinctly male and made a conscious choice to find a female engineer for the next open position.
“We said we were going to use female engineers as conscious examples, and it worked,” he said. At the time, he said, they were not forced to hire another employee, and he saw this as an opportunity to prioritize female engineers to ensure the company had a reasonable balance. He admits it’s still not ideal, but he’s aware and doing his best to keep the team balanced.
The $20 million announced today is actually two funds: an initial $15 million seed round that closed in Q3 last year, and a $5 million extension that closed in April. The investment was led by Battery Ventures, Grove Ventures, and StageOne Ventures, with participation from Secret Chord Ventures, Cerca Partners, Operator Partners, and a host of well-known industry angel investors.
