Wing Cloud – a new approach to managing today’s tech complexity

Elad Ben-Israel (co-founder and CEO at Wing Cloud is sad because he believes in cloud and many cloud adopters are entering the slough of disillusion, as they discover that their new cloud environments are both more complex and more expensive than they expected. That is sort-of obvious – the old world of transaction processing, where nothing reached the database until the whole transaction committed, and developers could concentrate on solving business problems, leaving Ops (and DBA, database administration) to worry about security, performance, scale, deployment etc, is over. Simplicity has been traded for flexibility and velocity of change.

As Ben-Israel’s fellow co-founder, Shai Ber (VP R&D at Wing Cloud) told us:

The cloud is a big, distributed computer but current programming languages are designed to tell a single machine what to do. To bridge this gap, developers must use custom configuration and code to stitch together machines and services and spend significant time and effort on non-functional requirements instead of focusing on functional code.”

He’s right, although I dislike the term “nonfunctional” as it implies that what it deals with – performance, security, resilience etc – is unimportant.

Wing Cloud has a solution, and although it isn’t ready for real-world application deployment yet, Ben-Israel and Ber are pleased with the traction it is getting. In essence, it is infrastructure and code described in one language, WinLang, which will eventually be used to describe an enterprise DevOps platform, where Ops is an equal player with Dev and developers are free to concentrate on the functional requirements – the business logic. And, no, most people won’t be learning WinLang, they will simply interface with the new platform.

Wing Cloud will implement this platform in a phased way, starting with the local environment and its founders are firm believers in Open Source Software (OSS), so its development tools will be more-or-less free and you will pay for production use and support, with a consumption-based pricing model.

So far so good. I think that this will address many of the problems with DevOps. DevOps can become an end in itself, delivering DevOps instead of mutable business outcomes, and you have to invent new versions of DevOps, such as DevSecOps, to deliver the non-functional aspects of a business solution that were left out from the original DevOps idea. I like what I am hearing about Wing Cloud. It reminds me a bit of the separation of concerns in the COBOL environment with its Environment Division (looked after by Ops), Data Division (looked after by DBA) and the Procedure Division (for the programmers), although Wing Cloud should be a much richer implementation of the concept. As I’ve implied, I think it will complete DevOps by raising Ops and the non-functional aspects of a business outcome to equal importance with functional development – true outcome automation.

I also think that the OSS approach is the right one although, if I had to criticise, I would say that open source developers are often too fixated on low-level code. I’d love to see these OSS ideas translated into “5 GL” and Digital Twin – but that is for the future. As my fellow analyst, Paul Bevan, says “We’ll have to wait for the “eco-system” to realise that is what will be needed to accelerate mainstream business adoption”.

I like the Wing Cloud mission statement:

Our mission is to democratize the cloud with a new open-source programming language that enables developers to deliver better code faster and more securely, with the autonomy to build, run, debug, and test complete cloud applications within their local environments, free for development, paid for production.”

To learn more about Wing Cloud, check out these blogs from Ben-Israel, here and here. Wing Cloud will be a vertically integrated complete cloud solution. I will be following its future development with interest.