There are two definitions of fugue. One refers to music (contrapuntal composition), and the other involves psychiatry (awareness of one’s identity). But thanks to new technology in the enterprise cloud computing world offered by a rising startup of the same name, there may soon be another meaning: automation.

Fugue Inc. emerged from stealth mode last year and has been focused on delivering a suite of cloud infrastructure automation products in support of Amazon Web Services Inc. accounts, with plans to expand to other providers. In recent months, the startup has been successful in attracting rules-driven, policy-oriented sectors, such as financial services, healthcare and government, where human errors can be costly. The company’s offering of full runtime system enforcement in an automated mode appears to be gaining traction.

“We’re in this moment, this decade, of huge change in cloud computing. Software is eating the world, and the use of cloud is software, if you do it right,” said Josh Stella (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Fugue.

Stella spoke about this and other subjects during a visit with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, at this week’s AWS Summit in New York City. They discussed Stella’s work before starting his company, use cases for Fugue’s products, the challenges of managing the cloud’s infrastructure, future releases and how the company got its name. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features Josh Stella as our Guest of the Week.

Lack of awareness showed need for tools

The evolution of cloud computing has been instructive for Stella and his team, where prior experiences highlighted the need for organizations to get a better handle on cloud deployment. Prior to starting Fugue, Stella worked as a principal solutions architect for AWS, and he would call on some customers who did not even know their companies were in the cloud.

“We’d go into a new customer, and they would say they didn’t think they were on cloud,” Stella recalled. “Then we looked and there were 130 cloud accounts scattered through the organization.”

This lack of customer awareness helped plant the seeds for what became Fugue’s original products launched at AWS Summit in 2016. One is Fugue Compositions, which uses a modular language called Ludwig to declare cloud policies as code. By sharing and enforcing libraries across the enterprise, cloud resources could be used more consistently and visibly.

The other product — Fugue Conductor — is an orchestration engine running inside a cloud account to enforce and automate policies. This role-based access control is designed to prevent unauthorized action, with the side benefit of being able to know who accessed what and when.

“We have a customer in financial services that uses Fugue to build their entire CICD [continuous integration and deployment] pipeline,” Stella said. “And then it integrates itself so that all of their infrastructure and security policies are completely automated whenever a developer does a pull request.”

The security structure for this Fugue customer is already automated in the policy code that will “crash” the action for an unauthorized developer. “If that infrastructure did not meet policy, it’s a build fail,” Fugue’s founder explained.

Support for AWS GovCloud

This kind of automated security structure is understandably of interest to government clients. In June, Fugue announced its support for AWS GovCloud, an AWS region designed to allow U.S. government agencies to run sensitive workloads. Fugue’s approach is that by automating compliance validations, the thorny problems of cloud governance will become easier and more reliable.

“If Fugue is happy, your infrastructure is correct,” Stella said.

Fugue’s technology is clearly designed to address growing concern among information technology executives that building a cloud infrastructure is just the beginning of their problems. It’s the management after the cloud is in place that has them reaching for heartburn medication.

“People go into this thinking that the Day One problem is the hard one,” Stella said. “It’s not. The Day Two problem ‘on’ is the hard one. Now that I’ve built this thing, is it right anymore?”

Fugue’s message of “automation is salvation” has also attracted industry recognition in recent months. In June, the company was named to the “Cool Vendors” list in a cloud computing report published by Gartner.

With AWS re:Invent 2017 scheduled for late November, Fugue is planning to announce new products, although Stella was reluctant to provide any specifics, other than to say the releases could “really change some of the dynamics around being able to adopt cloud.”

But he was willing to address how his fledgling company got its name. The name originated from the musical definition, more specifically from its use in a book written by Douglas Hofstadter in the late 1970s that described how cognition emerged from hidden human neurons. There was also the problem that names are growing increasingly limited.

“There aren’t many English words left that are real words, and I didn’t want to make something up,” Stella concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is an unpaid media partner for AWS Summit. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE