A startup called FluidCloud emerged today to solve the longstanding problem of cloud infrastructure lock-in, saying it has the tools and the technology to reverse-engineer any computing environment so workloads can be shifted from one cloud to the next.

It means business, too – it has just raised $8.1 million in seed funding, with Unusual Ventures named as the sole investor in the round.

FluidCloud co-founder and Chief Executive Sharad Kumar told SiliconANGLE that most enterprises have long striven to become more agile and to extricate themselves from a reliance on any single cloud provider. Yet despite their best efforts, they often fail miserably.

Because modern cloud architectures are so complex and difficult, the task of switching providers has traditionally been so slow and expensive that it’s simply unrealistic to do so. And even if a company does manage to migrate, it only ends up being locked into the next cloud platform.

It’s a problem, because if a company’s most critical applications are tied to a single vendor, they’re stuck paying whatever prices that provider decides to charge them. And if the cloud provider suffers a major outage, the customer has nowhere to go.

This is the problem that FluidCloud is trying to solve. To do so, it has created a simple, one-click platform that employs artificial intelligence-based agents to help companies quickly clone their cloud infrastructure environment, so it can be ported in its entirety to another cloud platform.

Kumar explained that the FluidCloud Platform reverse engineers the customer’s environment into a “standard infrastructure definition,” so it can be rapidly remapped across any cloud architecture in seconds. The platform is rooted in AI and “infrastructure as code” principles and helps transform cloud infrastructure designs into strategic and portable assets that can be deployed anywhere.

Traditional cloud migrations are enormously complex and intricate manual operations. Kumar likens the process to “reconstructing an entire city.” Engineers have to “rebuild every building, every road, every utility and every security checkpoint – all while the city is still running,” he said, referring to elements such as compute, networking, storage, access management and policies.

To automate this process, FluidCloud has built an intelligent system of cloud AI agents that are trained to understand and replicate a customer’s entire cloud infrastructure environment. “These agents leverage a programmatic Cloud API mapping engine that we’ve painstakingly developed, covering every layer of compute, networking, storage, IAM, and security policies across multiple providers,” Kumar explained.

FluidCloud’s AI agents are prepared to tackle even the biggest workloads running in the cloud, including global-scale applications such as Uber or Trello, Kumar said. Such applications typically have hundreds of microservices deployed across compute, network and storage services on a cloud such as AWS, he said. Using its AI agents, FluidCloud can identify each service and its configuration, copy it and then clone it on the target cloud platform.

“We can replicate the entire architecture onto Google Cloud, for example, with the same configurations, cloning every VPC, load balancer, security rule, database endpoint and storage volume,” he said.

Once that’s done, FluidCloud provides DevOps teams with a new CI/CD pipeline tailored to the new cloud provider. With a small number of application code tweaks, an app built on AWS can seamlessly run on Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Afterwards, the customer will be able to decide if they want to become multicloud or decommission the old application infrastructure.

“What used to take months of re-engineering has been turned into a one-click cloning process, empowering enterprises to become multicloud in days, rather than quarters,” Kumar said.

Besides helping enterprises become more agile, FluidCloud also puts them in stronger position when it comes to negotiating the terms of their cloud infrastructure agreements and costs. By easing the headaches involved in migrating, the startup helps companies avoid being chained to any particular cloud platform, and as a result, the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud can be forced to offer more attractive terms.

“We make cloud providers compete for your business,” Kumar said. “When cloud providers know you can move workloads at will, they’re far more likely to offer aggressive pricing, custom SLAs and other incentives.”

Kumar didn’t talk much about FluidCloud’s customers or say how many enterprises have used its cloud agents to migrate their applications so far. But the startup has already won a big fan in the shape of the cloud infrastructure startup Vultr Inc., which is trying to compete with the likes of AWS by offering a more affordable and less complex alternative to access high-performance compute.

Vultr’s developer advocate Mirdul Swarup said FluidCloud makes it easier than ever for enterprises to switch from AWS to its cloud platform. “It’s a game-changer for customers who value cloud freedom and want the flexibility to innovate on the platforms they choose,” he said.

Unusual Ventures co-founder and Managing Partner John Vrionis said FluidCloud has managed to solve a problem that has frustrated engineering teams for years, enabling true infrastructure portability. “It shouldn’t require a year of professional services,” he pointed out. “FluidCloud’s early customers are reaping the cost and performance benefits that are only accessible when developers have instant flexibility to innovate wherever they want.”

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