Infrastructure-as-code startup Pulumi Corp. has started pitching itself as the industry’s first cloud engineering platform provider that unites every aspect of deploying software applications to the cloud.

Announcing the latest version of its platform today, Pulumi 3.0, the company said it offers a way for developers to build, deploy and launch their applications faster and more easily using any language on any major cloud platform.

Pulumi sells an open-source infrastructure-as-code platform that enables companies to automate the management of their cloud environments. Generally, deploying an app on a cloud platform involves lots of different steps, including provisioning and configuring the infrastructure resources, defining security rules and setting up the app’s individual components. These are laborious tasks that are usually handled by writing code that enables the workflows to be standardized with a reusable script.

The problem is that each cloud platform requires developers to write these scripts in a niche programming language that’s specific to one particular tool, meaning there’s a steep learning curve involved for each one. Pulumi eliminates this learning curve by making it possible to use standard programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go and .NET/C# to manage cloud infrastructure. Pulumi says this approach is much easier, mainly because they have code constructs that make programming easier.

The Pulumi 3.0 release brings some big updates, including what the company calls new “native providers” for each of the main cloud platforms. They include Microsoft Azure, already available, Google Cloud, in preview, and Amazon Web Services, coming soon.

The native providers extend Pulumi’s capabilities by covering 100% of each cloud’s services, Pulumi said, and same-day updates whenever the underlying cloud platform updates its application programming interfaces. The new Pulumi Packages for each cloud make it possible to build and share reusable infrastructure and application components in the developer’s language of choice.

Pulumi also announced a new Automation API that makes it possible to embed infrastructure automation into larger programs by using Pulumi as a library. Through this, infrastructure engineers can create their own internal platforms for dynamically provisioning infrastructure. Developers can then fire up the infrastructure they need for each app they deploy, without the need for ticketing systems associated with legacy tooling, the company said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said that the race is on to deliver a multicloud platform that encompasses code production, operation and monitoring.

“Pulumi has created a cloud vendor-agnostic option, that now also enables multicloud support,” Mueller said. “That is exactly what big enterprises want for the next-generation applications, in order to protect their application investments and avoid cloud lock-in.”

Altogether, there are more than 70 new features in Pulumi 3.0, together with more than 1,000 improvements, according to the company.

Image: Pulumi