A former Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineer co-founded a company — Fugue — which today announced its cloud infrastructure automation product, also named Fugue. The software is designed to help AWS customers simplify their use of the cloud.

“The pain point that Fugue solves is when you have a certain amount of stuff running on AWS, then pointing at specific problems isn’t adequate,” says Josh Stella, a co-founder and the CEO of Fugue. “You need to have a systems-level view.”

When Stella was a principal solutions architect at AWS, he noted that when customers hit a high scale, they ran into a lot of complexity on cloud. “It gets hard quickly,” he says. “The end state of that complexity is way beyond what data centers have experienced.”

Fugue operates as the layer between the cloud and the services that further automate the deployment and management of middleware, databases, and other software that supports applications.

The Fugue software runs inside the user’s AWS account and provides a foundation layer for everything they’re managing in AWS. The product manages cloud infrastructure at the API layer across compute, storage, and network services. Following creation of the required cloud infrastructure, Fugue then automates the enforcement of corporate governance, compliance policies, and change controls.

The software uses Fugue Compositions, which the company created using Ludwig, a modular, compiled language designed for declaring cloud infrastructure and policies as code.

“We wrote Ludwig,” says Stella. “We looked around and everything else out there was ill-suited.” He says Ludwig is descriptive and “human readable,” allowing developers to code faster so that policies can be enforced on AWS quickly. Enterprise IT groups will use Ludwig to define a set of cloud infrastructure libraries for specific cloud application requirements. These libraries can be shared and enforced across the organization.

The software also includes the Fugue Conductor, an orchestration engine that runs within the customer’s cloud account and operates as the “kernel” for cloud environments, continuously automating and enforcing infrastructure and policies. The Conductor constantly checks running resources and reconfigures them if changes occur that are inconsistent with Ludwig definitions, preventing configuration and compliance drift.

Fugue is designed to support legacy applications migrated from the data center as well as the latest cloud-native applications.

Fugue is launching on AWS, but its founders plan for it to support other clouds in the future.

Fugue, the company, was founded in late 2013. It’s raised about $34 million in venture capital, with its primary investor being New Enterprise Associates. The Maryland-based company employs about 50 people.