Guest: Elad Ben-Israel (LinkedIn)
Company: Wing Cloud (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Wing Cloud is working to help reduce the complexity of cloud for developers so that they do not need to become DevOps experts in order to use containers. The company recently released Wing Simulator enabling developers to run and test their containerized applications locally while also empowering platform teams to control how those applications are deployed on the infrastructure.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Chicago, Elad Ben-Israel, CEO and Co-Founder of Wing Cloud, talks about the company and how it is working to reduce cloud complexity for developers. He discusses their open source programming language, Winglang, and how teamed with Wing Simulator, they are helping developers leverage cloud outside of the container.

 Key highlights from this video interview:

• Ben-Israel talks about the company’s announcement of the released support for containers in Wing, the new programming language they are working on. He discusses their goals for creating a high-level experience for containers and enabling developers to use containers without needing to become DevOps experts.
• Wing Simulator enables developers to run and test applications on their local machine, showing the application as they develop it. Ben-Israel explains the key features of Wing Simulator and how it is helping developers build cloud applications.
• Terminologies have been shifting with DevOps and SREs, but the focus is now going back to the developer experience. Yet, Ben-Israel feels the distinction is between engineers responsible for the problem space of the application and those responsible for the platform. He discusses his goals to empower developers to use the cloud better.
• Ben-Israel talks about the role open source programming languages like Winglang play in the ecosystem, saying it gives developers the ability to use the cloud directly in their code. He feels that it is the first step to enabling them to leverage cloud outside of the container.
• With so many open source programming languages, Ben-Israel discusses the two key differences that set Winglang apart from the competition: the code that is written describes both the cloud infrastructure and the application code in the same language and the entire language and standard library is designed for cloud development.
• Ben-Israel talks about the adoption they are seeing with Wing Programming Language saying they now have over 100 contributors to the project. He discusses the community around it and its unified vision of changing the way teams are building things on the cloud.
• Wing is empowering developers to use the cloud in their applications as first-class citizens in their code and test them in the simulator. However, it also gives DevOps and platform teams the ability to fully control how those applications are deployed on their infrastructure. Ben-Israel discusses how Wing is empowering each of those personas.
• Ben-Israel feels that Kubernetes is fantastic for scaling applications and making them highly available, but he feels it’s a production technology. He does not believe developers need to care about Kubernetes as a production tool but rather to decouple those concerns so that developers can concentrate on developing and testing.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.