More than 10 years ago, cloud computing began offering primitive building blocks for developing cloud applications from storage, computing and simple databases. But now cloud computing is changing not only how developers create applications, but how entire organizations operate.

“We are going to see a lot of new compelling experiences to build [applications] thanks to cloud capabilities,” said Joe Duffy (pictured left), founder and chief executive officer of Pulumi Corp. “The fact that you have AI and ML and all these infinite data services like Snowflake just an arm’s-length away that you can use as building blocks in your applications … application developers love that. And if we can just empower them to run fast, they will run fast, and they’ll build great applications. And the infrastructure teams and security engineering will also be essential to enable that feature.”

Duffy and Justin Fitzhugh (pictured right), vice president of engineering, cloud engineering and release/quality at Snowflake, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed cloud engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and Pulumi and Snowflake’s collaboration. (* Disclosure below.)

The engineers of cloud computing

Although the idea of “renting computing services” is nothing new, the concept of paying for those services similar to how somebody would pay for the electric bill is what made developers turn their heads.

“It really struck us that the cloud is changing everything about how we develop software,” Duffy said.

Before enterprise cloud computing took hold, traditional IT systems were incapable of interoperating with other related systems. “Frequently, we heard from leaders that there were silos between organizations; they couldn’t build things quickly enough, move quickly enough,” Duffy explained.

Fast forward, and new cloud native capabilities and the public cloud started solving those data silos, and businesses leveraging the cloud began their transformative journey. “So that was the opportunity we saw with Pulumi,” Duffy stated. “We called us cloud engineers [and said] let’s imagine a world where every developer is a cloud developer and infrastructure teams are also enabling that new way of building.”

These engineers in cloud computing started evaluating existing business infrastructure and designing migration plans from on-premises to cloud-based systems. Cloud engineers saw the opportunity and created their own model, Fitzhugh pointed out.

“If you think from a cloud engineering perspective, we don’t have the typical network engineers, the typical data center engineers — instead, we are shifting our model,” he stated.

Managing and provisioning entire computer data centers is a thing of the past. No more physical hardware configurations, Fitzhugh added. “What we do in cloud engineering is away from the [traditional] operations model, and even DevOps model, towards a software engineering model. That is the big shift to cloud engineering,” he said.

Engineering infrastructure as code

Now, companies can focus less on maintaining infrastructure, doing software updates, installations, etc., according to Duffy. It’s now about how businesses can leverage more on what is already built and give their developers what they need — quick and easy.

“People are looking for new ways to empower developers, but that empowerment has to come with guard-rails,” Duffy said.

Writing infrastructure as code can help developers to version and commit to a repository. This new approach benefits developers because now they can deploy their infrastructure anywhere — on-prem, in multiple clouds, hybrid clouds, etc.

“Teams are modernizing their entire infrastructure platforms, and they are looking at technologies like Kubernetes to do that,” Duffy stated.

Kubernetes has been enabling infrastructure as code for a while now. “But when we started, there weren’t any good Kubernetes clusters, and now fast forward three years, many customers are using Pulumi to get up and running with EKS in AWS. Pulumi can be the bridge from on-prem to the public cloud.”

Data platforms built from the cloud (or cloud native) like Snowflake can leverage that opportunity as well. For example, Snowflake’s resources can be managed with infrastructure as code tools like Pulumi.

“That is where this cloud engineering piece comes in. It is really to focus on how we can abstract the lower infrastructure and scalability pieces and to allow developers [create] an application that is providing business value in a transparent and seamless way,” Fitzhugh concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Pulumi Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Pulumi nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE