Seattle-based startup Pulumi is taking on the Herculean task of bridging developer code with the growing number of cloud-based destinations, including containers, serverless, and infrastructure.

The company’s platform is designed to allow developers and DevOps teams to build and manage cloud-based deployments using a consistent approach. Pulumi’s secret sauce is its ability to act as a translation layer between the language a developer is using to write code and where that code is being sent.

Pulumi CEO and co-founder Joe Duffy said the company started with a focus on making it easier to use containers in a production environment.

“We found that when you tried to use containers in a production or team environment it was clear the promise was there, but the reality had not kept pace,” Duffy said. “Every line of code required another line of code to implement.”

He explained that this was a common pain point for customers regardless of the organizational size.

“Current solutions tackle from just one angle, either serverless, containers, or infrastructure,” Duffy said. “They don’t really allow for the development team to talk with the DevOps team. We are looking to level the playing field so people can productively share workloads.”

Some of that leveling is due to the ability to re-use configurations for different environments. As an example, Duffy said the platform was able to take what was more than 1,000 lines of code in a Helm deployment down to less than 200 lines of Pulumi code that included 15 lines that could be re-used.

The platform is multi-language, multicloud, and fully extensible. Languages supported with the initial launch include JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Go. Cloud platform support includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Kubernetes integration works with any public, private, or hybrid cloud deployment.

Duffy is also a big supporter of the move toward serverless deployments. He noted that serverless was “completely game changing” and that one customer using serverless had managed to run applications at a fraction of its previous costs.

The Pulumi platform is available as either a free, open source model with all of the tools needed for developing apps and infrastructure or as a managed software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Pulumi was founded about a year ago. The founding team included Duffy, who was director of technical strategy and engineering at Microsoft; Eric Rudder, who held various EVP roles and was chief technical strategy officer at Microsoft; and Luke Hoban, who previously served in product and engineering roles at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.

The firm’s technology attracted $5 million in seed funding from Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital. The company has 13 employees.

Duffy said Pulumi is focused on continuing to build out its core capabilities. He admitted that the company's support today had a lot of breadth, “but we need deeper support in some areas like production and multicloud frameworks.”