Wing Cloud launched out of stealth mode with an impressive seed round of funding.  To find out more, VMblog spoke with Shai Ber, COO and Co-Founder of Wing Cloud.  

VMblog:  $20Million is an impressive seed round. You have great institutional investors behind you as well as angels from Datadog and Hashicorp. What is it about the mission behind Wing Cloud that is creating this level of interest?

Shai Ber:  Investors are attracted to Wing Cloud because it addresses major pain points with cloud development and management. First and foremost, it simplifies the complex engineering task of deploying and managing applications across various cloud providers, a process that has become increasingly critical due to diverse commercial and data residency requirements. Furthermore, the Wing toolchain improves developer productivity by providing an enhanced experience where developers can focus on creating customer value without getting lost in the technicalities of cloud mechanics. The toolchain's value doesn't stop with developers. It also includes solutions for operation teams that help them to manage applications in production more efficiently.

The market opportunity for Wing Cloud arises from its innovative solutions for both high-level and fundamental challenges of cloud development and management. Investors like the company's approach of tackling root causes instead of just treating symptoms. They believe that Wing Cloud is well positioned to disrupt the industry with its ambitious mission to add significant value across the development and management workflows in the cloud. 

VMblog:  Winglang specifically is an open source programming language attempting to create a single, unified language for the cloud that can work across multiple providers and platforms. On one hand, it seems like an obvious idea that I am surprised hasn't been attempted already; on the other hand, it seems incredibly ambitious. What do you think Winglang's potential is to change how developer's build applications in the cloud?

Ber:  We believe Winglang has potential to streamline developers' experience of building applications in the cloud by reducing their cognitive load, increasing their iteration speeds, and keeping them in their flow.

• Iteration speed: Winglang comes with a local simulator and a visualization and debugging console that support instant hot reloading. These tools empower developers to iterate more swiftly with immediate feedback on code modifications, visualizing, interacting, and debugging their code locally via the Wing Console.

• Cognitive load: Winglang aims to lighten developers' cognitive load by representing abstract cloud resources as native language elements. This strategy diminishes the need for developers to manually control these resources or deeply understand numerous layers of the cloud stack. Instead, they can focus their efforts on crafting application code, while Winglang's compiler handles the cloud mechanics. For example, the automated generation of Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. Another key aspect of Winglang's approach to reducing cognitive load is its introduction of inflights (https://docs.winglang.io/concepts/inflights). They allow developers to write distributed code that looks and feels almost like that of a monolith, with all the cognitive benefits that come with it: code that is easier to follow, test and debug.
  

• Keeping developers in their flow: Winglang handles cloud mechanics, enabling developers to focus more on the business logic of their applications and less on infrastructure. Our goal is to reach a point where they can create entire applications in dev environments without needing much intervention from DevOps. On the other hand, Winglang also aims to promote the autonomy of DevOps engineers. Compiler plugins (https://docs.winglang.io/blog/2023/02/17/plugins) are a way for them to apply non-functional concerns to the application in the form of policies, without having to communicate with the application developers much or to know every resource being used by them. If we succeed in making developers and DevOps engineers more autonomous, we will be able to reduce the number of context switches and hand-offs between them. 
  

VMblog:  We've seen an anti-cloud trend over the past year, with companies returning to monoliths and on-prem solutions. From my perspective, this is a testament to both the complexity of cloud, as well as the failure of movements like DevOps, serverless, and the influx of 3rd party tooling to live up to the promises of reducing complexity for developers. Why do you think your approach to solving these problems is unique?

Ber:  We think all these pains that are causing companies to return to monoliths and on-prem solutions are derived from a single source - that traditional programming languages are built to tell single machines what to do. The cloud, however, is a giant distributed machine with a lot of services.  Other solutions try to solve different symptoms that stem from the source issue but we believe that without treating the source of the problem you can never fully solve it. This is why our approach is to solve it from the root by developing a programming language that treats the cloud as its computer and is able to give developers a cloud development experience that is very similar to building a monolith. The traits of the language allow us to build downstream tools that complete this monolith-like development experience across the development, testing, staging and management phases.

These tools include the cloud SDK, which is a high-level abstraction layer for all the clouds and provides portability, local development, unit testing, debugging, and simulation abilities during development. We have preview environments that allow developers to interact with Wing applications in pull requests and collaborate with other stakeholders during the staging phase. In the future, we'll introduce a solution for the deployment phase that will include support for unified deployment and governance across public and private clouds. Finally, we are working on the Wing Console - a unified application-centric management console for the operation phase.

VMblog:  What is the ultimate vision for Wing Cloud? Having just launched, I am sure there is a lot to still figure out -- but what's your current north star?

Ber:  The ultimate vision for Wing Cloud is to dramatically simplify the process of building and managing distributed systems on the cloud. Our north star is to empower developers and DevOps teams to harness the power of the cloud together, making it as straightforward as building monolithic applications in a traditional environment.

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