Cloud is convoluted, containerised, compounded and essentially complex. In most areas of its usage and deployment, we see fundamentally intertwined enterprise software toolsets, entire platforms, lower-level dependencies and all manner of neural connection points occasionally fusing together in harmony, but more often forming disconnections, misconfigurations and anomalies.
Located in the Holy Land city of Tel-Aviv, Wing Cloud wants to address some of the mismatches with the launch of a new unifying cloud-centric open source called Winglang.
Pronounced the same as America’s oldest brewing company Yuengling, Winglang’s elevator sell is an ability to unify cloud infrastructure and application code into a single programming model that works on the major hyperscaler services from AWS, Azure, GCP and across environments spanning the use of Kubernetes, serverless and other as yet unspecified central elements of cloud componentry.
First-class cloud infrastructure
The development team behind Winglang describe it as an open source programming language designed for building distributed systems that use cloud infrastructure as a first-class citizen. Behind that arguably cheesy marketingspeak, the company appears to be suggesting that its language works with cloud base layer substrate elements in their most native state.
The Winglang compiler produces a ready-to-deploy package that includes both Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) definitions for Terraform, CloudFormation and other cloud provisioning engines; it also includes the ability to work with Node.js code designed to run on compute platforms such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, or edge platforms.
“We’re abstracting away a lot of the gritty details of building applications on top of cloud infrastructure,” said Elad Ben-Israel, CEO and co-founder of Wing Cloud. “The cloud has evolved into a [set of] incredibly powerful computing platforms, but customers still find themselves having to deal with burdensome tasks across security, networking, deployment and operations to build and manage even the simplest systems.”
According to a recent survey from Sentry and SlashData, the most common challenge reported by software engineers is an unclear boundary between application and infrastructure ownership. To address this, Wing Cloud is also launching the private beta of its first commercial offering: a visual cloud management solution that provides both developers and operators with a shared, real-time view of an application’s architecture and data flow.
Polyglot pedigree
Wing Cloud co-founder Ben-Israel lists a selection of other open source projects on his ‘what I talk about at dinner parties’ resume. He has worked in the cloud infrastructure space on projects including the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), a well-known and popular CDK for Kubernetes (CDK8s), Projen (a service used to define and maintain complex project configuration through code) and JSII, a technology that allows code in any language to naturally interact with JavaScript classes (it is fact the technology that enables the AWS Cloud Development Kit to deliver polyglot libraries from a single codebase)… to name just a few. Ben-Israel is joined by COO Shai Ber, a former software developer at Microsoft who previously built a company known as Aniways, an animated advertisement tool that enables chat and messaging app owners to monetise their products with interactive ads.
“Winglang will be the programming language of the future,” claimed Eric Riddoch, senior MLOps Engineer at entertainment AI company Benlabs, somewhat grandly. “My head is spinning with the implications of Pulumi, Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation and Kubernetes YAML being abstracted away by a compiled cloud-oriented programming language.”
A, not ‘the’, but still…
It is of course rather more likely that Winglang will be “a” programming language of the future, with the new breed of cloud-native technologies compelling the development of coding tools and services at this level. To see it emanating from the Holy Land in this instance is arguably no surprise either, the country has become a tech start-up nation and we see the OurCrowd organisations propelling many of the country’s brightest new talents forward and (if that wasn’t enough) we are also seeing Jerusalem and other cities now featuring on the international technology conference map.
More cloud-based hummus anyone? Yes, please בבקשה & thank you תודה!
Free image use: Wikipedia Commons.