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Bron: artikel integraal overgenomen van techcrunch
Origineel auteur: Karan Bhasin

Infrastructure as code (IaC) has been gaining wider adoption among DevOps teams in recent years, but the complexities of data center configuration and management continue to create problems — and opportunities.

We surveyed top investors in IaC startups to find out more.

Overall, they see a lot of room for growth given all of the manual work still done by DevOps teams across organizations of all sizes.

However, IaC itself requires highly trained engineers to implement and manage within organizations, and there’s a shortage of software infrastructure engineers with IaC skills. This could favor IaC startups that are trying to offer complete solutions to customers.

At the same time, some large companies will continue to manage data centers internally and thus build out automation internally instead of with outside startups. We spoke to Sheila Gulati, managing director, Tola Capital

Sheila Gulati, managing director, Tola Capital

Can infrastructure as code be the solution for the implementation and configuration of servers, similar to how cloud was the solution for physical servers? Which areas do you think IaC’s capability to set up any cloud resource will be most used?

The world of the modern cloud has shifted how we think about infrastructure altogether. We live in a multicloud and many-cloud world and these paradigms are redefining the modern cloud era. IaC can be used for any type of cloud workload or architecture, but it is a necessity for anyone building on the modern cloud. This is especially true for modern cloud architectures such as serverless applications, containerized applications running Kubernetes, AI/ML and more. Modern cloud architectures provide many benefits such as increased innovation, faster time to market, improved reliability and reduced costs. However, this has increased the burden of managing cloud infrastructure. The number of cloud services available is growing every year and modern architectures are composed of many loosely coupled, interdependent services and APIs. The result is that the number of cloud resources that people must manage is going up at a tremendous pace. The only way to manage this complexity is with IaC.

Today, we are seeing a new generation of IaC platforms that are designed from the ground up to meet the demands of the modern cloud. For example, Pulumi and its cloud engineering platform is helping infrastructure teams and developers tame cloud complexity by enabling them to write code in the languages that they know and love, and use software engineering practices to build, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure. In contrast to legacy IaC tools that use domain specific languages, modern IaC platforms give practitioners the full power of programming languages, which make it easier to manage the complex interdependencies of modern cloud applications. They allow developers to use existing software development tools, including IDEs, package managers and test frameworks, which enable them to build faster and reuse best practices, while testing more frequently.

Do you see IaC’s ability to streamline processes attracting startups in competitive sectors looking to get their product across the line first?

Yes. The companies in our portfolio who have embraced IaC and cloud engineering principles are also the ones most intent on rapid product development and streamlining their ability to bring new products to market faster. This requires investment in engineering talent, the platform and engineering practices.

It is important to take advantage of new cloud innovation to accelerate innovation and leverage IaC to more build products to efficiently meet customer needs. To support this it is critical for there to be partnership across providers within the IaC space to deliver the components that work together to support engineering teams.

Furthermore, we have seen teams that lean into more modern development platforms able to hire better developers more easily — a concern of every tech company today. The cultures that are more dev-forward and that are truly embracing the shift-left movement are where the best developers want to work!

Why are companies hesitant to adopt infrastructure as code? Can you outline the different ways IaC providers can market themselves to build their appeal?

IaC should be the obvious choice for any company that’s interested in delivering cloud applications at scale, reliably, and at high velocity. The concerns of the past are now obsolete. However, companies may hesitate to adopt it due to the cultural and process changes required, the risks of migrating an existing application, or they may not have the right skills on their team. In the past, we also had IaC platforms that required the use of domain-specific languages. All of this taken together can make the ramp to productivity seem steep.

IaC providers can market themselves by focusing on the tangible benefits they will provide to engineering teams as well as demonstrating the business value of adopting IaC so that stakeholders understand the value of making a change. Additionally, anything that can reduce the friction of onboarding like enabling developers to work in a language they already know will shorten the time to productivity and that is imperative. It is also important to enable discovery through the open source community.

Some companies offering IaC provide implementation and maintenance while others just provide the framework. Which model do you see being more successful?

Companies that provide the framework will be able to scale and grow more quickly. For something as critical and sensitive as managing infrastructure, it’s important to provide an open source framework that the community can review, contribute to and grow. Increasingly, purchasing decisions are made by practitioners and through grassroots adoption, so providing a framework that’s backed by a SaaS offering with high value features is critical. Having worked to grow developer communities for much of my career, I see the incredible virtuous cycle that companies have with their open source frameworks; we always tell our portfolio companies that building strong technical communities is the best investment!

How can a startup trying to establish itself in the IaC space set itself apart from the competition? Do you see a single company consolidating market share in the long run?

Having been part of the cloud evolution, starting with the earliest days of Azure, I recognized that with the evolution of cloud architectures, there would be an impact to how applications are built, how teams work together and the role of the developer. Developers are playing an ever more critical and ever-expanding role in delivering code that takes advantage of the cloud world while dealing with the complexity at the moment of building the code. There are many aspects of shift left that require more and more from developers that encompasses both security and infrastructure considerations.

When we saw Pulumi for the first time, we were incredibly excited by the vision the founders had and the ways Pulumi made IaC more accessible by supporting general purpose languages and the way they brought together the work of infrastructure teams, developers and security teams. They have also taken an approach that is squarely focused on the developers. We see the most innovative engineering teams from the likes of Snowflake, Lemonade and Mercedes-Benz adopting Pulumi.

Pulumi’s cloud engineering platform enables any company to employ standard software engineering practices and tools uniformly across infrastructure, application development and security teams to tame the complexity of delivering and managing modern cloud applications.

Interestingly, the recent Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed that developers with knowledge of Pulumi get paid the most of anyone surveyed, at $109,800, with Terraform, Docker and Git trailing by a wide margin. I think one takeaway is that cloud engineering, and Pulumi, represent a massive opportunity for developers who want to immediately improve their financial positions and career trajectories.

The market demand for cloud is growing and will only continue to increase because almost every company will be running cloud applications eventually. In addition, companies have different requirements and needs with regards to how they manage their cloud infrastructure. Thus, there is room for several players in this space in the long run without a single company consolidating market share.