Technology

Pulumi, a Seattle-based startup thatcoming out of stealth mode today, wants to make it easier for developers and ops team to define their infrastructure by writing code. Instead of using a cloud-specific configuration language, the servicetools allow developers to define the infrastructure for their applications in the same programming languages they already use for the applications.

The service has the backing of Madrone Venture Group and Tola Capital, with MadronaS. Somasegar joining its board of directors.

Whatinteresting here is that it doesn&t matter whether that infrastructure is containers, virtual machines or a serverless function, or whether those will run in a private cloud or one of the major public clouds. Supported languages currently include JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and Go, with support for .NET, Java, C# and node.js following soon.

PulumiCEO Joe Duffy has extensive open source experience (he built the team at Microsoft that took .NET open source), so itno surprise that Pulumi, too, has a number of open source components. What the service offers in addition to that, though, is a hosted service for managing Pulumi stacks after they have been deployed, as well as tools for collaboration and integrating the service into existing workflows.

As Duffy and his co-founder and executive chairman Eric Rudder argued when I met with the team ahead of todayannouncement, todayvendor-specific templating languages only lead to &configuration sprawl& and result in templates that mix code and configuration into an unholy mix of unreadable files that nobody wants to touch. This approach, Rudder and Duffy argued, also leads to a wider gap between developers and the operations team that try to support them.The team told me that it managed to reduce more than 1,000 lines of Helm code into fewer than 200 lines of Pulumi code, for example — and much of those 200 lines is reusable.

&There is a massive movement to the cloud among enterprise customers around the world,& said Somasegar. &As that trend continues to gather and gain momentum, new and transformative techniques are required as customers truly begin to take advantage of cloud-native capabilities. This transformation grows leaps and bounds with serverless computing starting to emerge as the next frontier to enable truly distributed applications and services that are powered by microservices and event-driven functions.& And his view, Pulumicode-first approach will help push this movement forward.

Pulumi is now available as a preview — and all of its pricing plans are currently available for free.

By placing all the information about services or complex manufacturing and assembly processes on a private, permissioned blockchain, the idea is that a company can create an &immutable& audit trail of data. When you think about it, currently this involves a labor-intensive combination of paper and networks. But initial trials with private blockchains in the last couple of years have shown there is potential to reduce the identification process of a data trail from several days to minutes.

Indications that this is becoming a hot issue amongst startups arrives today in two pieces of news.

Firstly, London-based &Gospel&(yes, that really is their name…) has raised £1.4m in seed funding from investors led by European-focused LocalGlobe.

The blockchain startup says it has been working with an unnamed &aerospace and defence manufacturer& to develop a proof of concept to improve record keeping for its supply chain. Whatthe betting itBritish Aerospace They aren&t saying.

At any rate, Gospel says it has developed a way of securely distributing data across decentralised infrastructures, offering companies the potential to automate records for complex products that usually require significant manual management. The idea is that is shares only the information it needs to, securely, with other partners in its supply chain, potentially leading to improved efficiency and lower costs of information recall.

Founded in December 2016 by entrepreneur Ian Smith, Gospel uses a private blockchain that requires users to set up a network of &nodes& within their ecosystem. Each party controls their own node and all the nodes must agree before any transaction can be processed and put on the blockchain. The node network acts as a consensus and provides a mechanism of trust.

Smith says: &For manufacturers and other businesses dealing with critical data there is a problem of trust in data systems, particularly when there is a need to share that data outside the organization. With Gospel technology we can provide an immutable record store so that trust can be fully automated between systems of forward-thinking businesses.&

Prior to this seed round, Gospel was backed by a number of angel investors including Gumtree co-founder Michael Pennington and Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer for the US Government during Barack Obamaadministration.

Secondly, Russia-based startup Waves, which has issued its own cryptocurrency, is getting into the space with the launch of Vostok, a universal blockchain solution for scalable digital infrastructure.

The idea is that public institutions and large enterprises can use the platform to enhance security, data storage, transparency and stability of their systems.

Vostok, which is named after the craft that carried Yuri Gagarin into space, claims to be significantly faster and cheaper than existing blockchain solutions, claiming 10,000 transactions per second (TPS) at only $0.000001 per a transaction. This is compared to Bitcoin which has transactional processing capacity of 3-6TPS and costs $0.951 per transaction. Vostok also uses a closed operational node set and Proof-of-Stake.

Sasha Ivanov, CEO and Founder of Vostok and Waves Platform, said: &Vostok is a multi- purpose solution, quite simple, but at the same time non-trivial. It will allow any large organisation to gain the benefits of blockchain without having to create new systems from scratch or retrain their staff.&

Fresh political woes for Russian security firm Kaspersky, which has reacted angrily to a vote in the European Union Parliament last week to ban its software — on the grounds that it has been &confirmed as malicious&.

Kaspersky denies this characterization of its software, saying it&untrue&.

It has also retaliated by pulling the plug on an existing collaboration with Europol, at least temporarily.

In a statement, a company spokesperson said:

Today, the European Parliament voted on a report in which Polish representative, MEP Fotyga included an amendment referencing Kaspersky Lab which is based on untrue statements. Although this report has no legislative power it demonstrates a distinct lack of respect for the company which has been a firm friend of Europe in the fight against cybercrime. It is for that reason that Kaspersky Lab has taken the difficult decision to temporarily halt our numerous collaborative European cybercrime-fighting initiatives, including that with Europol, until we receive further official clarifications from the European Parliament .

On account of this news, we will regretfully have to pause one of our successful joint initiatives&NoMoreRansomproject & recognised by theEuropean Parliament Research Services as a successfulcase of public-private cooperation in their recent report & helped many organisations and users to decrypt files on their devices, saving them from financial losses. We hope to be able to resume this and other European collaborative efforts soon.

Founder Eugene Kaspersky added that the company has been &forced to freeze& its co-operation as a result of the parliamentvote.

&This decision from the European Parliament welcomes cybercrime in Europe. I do not wish to do anything to further encourage the balkanization of the internet, but I feel that the decision taken in Europe leaves me with no choice but to take definitive action. Kaspersky Lab has only ever tried to rid the world of cybercrime. We have showed time and again that we disclose cyber threats regardless of origin and author, even to our own detriment. This is a setback for the fight against cyber threat, but we remain undeterred in our mission & to save the world from Cybercrime,& he also said in a statement.

The security firm has been battling controversy for around a year now, after the US government became suspicious of ties between the company and Russian intelligence agencies — and went on to ban its products for government use in September last year.

Kaspersky has continued to deny the allegations. But in Maythis year it announced it would be moving some of its core infrastructure outside Russia in a bid to combat suspicion that its software has been hacked or penetrated by the Russian government and used as a route for scooping up US intelligence.

It reiterates the steps it has been taking — &as a sign of our commitment to transparency and openness& — in its response to the EU parliamentvote, but also lashes out, accusing the parliament of taking a decision that &encourages cybercrime in Europe&.

&We believe that is does not contribute towards building an open and secure Digital Single Market but rather make it more fragmented and less competitive,& it also writes.

&Our 400 million users around the globe, trust us to protect their data. We will continue to successfully work with institutions and organisations to deliver a tangible positive impact by fighting cybercrime and defending European and global citizens from cyberthreats. Indeed, in April the European Commission officially stated that‘the Commission has no indication for any danger associated with this anti-virus engine&.&

Despite its aggressive response to the EU parliamentmotion, the company adds that it remains &willing to meet with MEPs to address any questions about the business, its leadership, expertise, technologies and methodology that they may have&.

During the vote last week, the parliament also resolved to perform &a comprehensive review of software, IT and communications equipment and infrastructure used in the institutions in order to exclude potentially dangerous programmes and devices&.