Seattle-based startup Pulumi this week launched its Crosswalk platform as a way to make it easier for developers and organizations to manage the myriad of deployment pieces available across Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Pulumi CEO Joe Duffy noted that this is necessary because “some areas of AWS are easy to get up and running but are hard to get into production.”

The Crosswalk open source framework packages together AWS best practices into a single platform. Duffy explained that it basically “codifies these best practices.”

Those best practices include AWS’ various container services like Elastic Container Service (ECS), Fargate, and Kubernetes (EKS); serverless functions and APIs based on AWS’ Lambda platform; core infrastructure components like AWS’ Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), Auto-Scaling Groups (ASGs), and application and network level Elastic Load Balancers (ELB); authentication and authorization; application and infrastructure monitoring; and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools.

“Amazon gives you a big bag of powerful Legos,” Duffy said. “We are taking those Legos and helping you build what you need.”

As an example of that help, Duffy explained that “we have taken the entire service area of AWS and made it easier to use. Instead of 2,000 lines of Yaml, it’s all just abstracted.”

One of the areas that Duffy said would benefit from Crosswalk is AWS’ Kubernetes-focused EKS platform. He noted that there are 20 pages of manual steps today to stand up that service, which is likely outside the time or skill resources available to most organizations. Pulumi is able to take an opinionated approach to its abstraction that reduces the necessary resources to just a handful lines of code.

In addition to targeting AWS' inherent complexity, Pulumi also targeted the cloud giant because of its position as the market’s largest public cloud provider. However, Duffy added that Pulumi remains “committed to multiple cloud providers, and you can expect not too far down the road that we will apply this to those other cloud providers.”

Crosswalk also builds on Pulumi’s already launched infrastructure as code platform. That platform was launched last year with the task of bridging developer code with the growing number of cloud-based destinations, including containers, serverless, and infrastructure.

Duffy explained that the company’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. The platform is multi-language, multi-cloud, and fully extensible. Languages supported include JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Go. Cloud platform support includes AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Crosswalk also ties into Pulumi’s recently altered pricing scheme that includes Team and Enterprise Edition products. Duffy said that the company has seen growing uptake across its various support tiers, with the current mix evenly split between the Team and Enterprise Edition.