Wing Simulator enables developers to build and test Kubernetes applications
Wing Cloud, the company behind the open source programming language Winglang that works across all clouds, enhances their container support with the ‘Wing Simulator’ that enables developers to build and test their containerized applications locally.
The Wing Simulator enables local and pre-production testing without the need for staging environments, complex configurations, and remote debugging – all of which are time-consuming and expensive. In production, the same application definition can then be compiled to a production-ready Helm chart and deployed to a Kubernetes cluster.
“Kubernetes is a powerful production tool, but its complexity is unjustifiable when it comes to development. Developers want to be able to run their containers locally within the context of their cloud system. By leveraging Winglang, developers can define their containerized apps in the context of the larger system, run within the Wing Simulator, and then deploy them using Helm and Terraform to their production environments,” said Elad Ben-Israel, CEO and Co-Founder of Wing Cloud.
“For developers who choose to use Kubernetes, we are increasing their productivity 10X with the Wing Simulator by giving them the ability to test containerized services on their local machine without needing any Kubernetes expertise or clusters,” added Ben-Israel.
According to Datadog’s research 9 Insights on Real-World Container Usage, Kubernetes is more popular than ever with nearly half of container organizations running Kubernetes to deploy and manage containers in a growing ecosystem. The same report notes that serverless technology is also on the rise, highlighting the need for a programming model that can span both of these popular technologies.
Winglang is an open source programming language designed for building distributed systems that leverage cloud resources as first-class citizens. The Winglang compiler produces a ready-to-deploy package that includes both infrastructure-as-code definitions for Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, or other cloud provisioning engines; as well as Node.js code designed to run on compute platforms such as AWS Lambda, Kubernetes, or edge platforms.
When building container-based applications in Winglang, developers can now leverage the Wing Simulator to interact with the architecture and data flow of the application from their development environment without having to actually deploy the application to production. This saves an immense amount of time and money on development cycles and removes the need for cumbersome development clusters and debugging tools.
The Wing Simulator orchestrates local Docker containers based on the application definition, and seamlessly connects them to other simulated cloud resources, providing developers with a local simulation of their entire cloud application and enables fast end-to-end development and testing without needing to deploy anything to the cloud or to a Kubernetes cluster.
“I’m very excited about Wing Cloud because it elegantly juxtaposes for developers both abstracting away the underlying cloud infrastructure and taking advantage of technical features of specific cloud providers when they need to,” said Amit Agarwal, President at Datadog.
Wing Cloud launched out of stealth in July with $20 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures, Grove Ventures, and StageOne Ventures; with participation from Secret Chord Ventures, Cerca Partners, and Operator Partners. Angel investors include Amit Agarwal, President at Datadog; Armon Dadgar, Co-Founder and CTO of HashiCorp; Benny Schnaider, Co-Founder of Salto; Zack Kanter, Founder of Stedi; and other industry leaders.