Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Thursday, October 3, 2024

Startup Pulumi Rolls Cloud-Native Tools 

via Shutterstock

A new programming platform designed to accelerate cloud-native application development is jumping on the multi-cloud bandwagon to deploy code quickly to the cloud in order to deliver container and serverless applications.

Pulumi Corp., which was launched in June by a pair of veteran tool developers, also this week announced early-round venture financing totaling $15 million. The Series A funding round was led by Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital.

Seattle-based Pulumi promotes it open source software development kit as a means of deploying cloud-native infrastructure as code using programming languages like Go and Python. That infrastructure can be used to deliver managed services and applications across public clouds or private and hybrid clouds based on the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator, OpenStack or VMware (NYSE: VMW) virtual machines.

The startup released new libraries in September for Kubernetes support in the cloud and on-premises.

The software-as-a-service offering is designed to complement Pulumi’s open-source SDK. The startup launched a free “community edition” of its development platform in June that supports a range of cloud-native infrastructure stacks.

A new “team” edition released this week includes features such as workflow integration and other features aimed at DevOps groups. Those tools are designed to surpass current DevOps approaches to cloud programming that are proving difficult to scale, investors said.

The startup said it would use the new venture funding to accelerate adoption of its open-source and enterprise platforms as more users shift to multi-cloud architectures that require continuous software delivery for cloud-native applications and services.

Pulumi’s founders—CEO Joe Duffy, executive chairman Eric Rudder and CTO Luke Hoban—previously held top developer positions at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN).

The startup said it wants to address the proliferation of developer tools, domain-specific languages and workflows as the cloud applications become more ephemeral and stateless. “All developers have become cloud developers, and [they] need a programming model for the cloud,” the company asserts.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

AIwire