By Jonas Bonér, CEO and CTO for Lightbend, Inc.             

Cloud complexity is slowing engineering teams

Cloud infrastructure today is a thriving ecosystem of products driving innovation in many areas. But it’s proving to be quite complex, skills are limited, and development teams are drowning. Business initiatives structured on the promise of the cloud—speed to market, scalability, and cost-effectiveness—are instead faced with slower and more costly projects than projected, fraught with overwhelmed engineering teams and a growing accumulation of technical debt.

To tackle some of this complexity, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard “operating system” for the cloud today; it is excellent at managing, orchestrating, and ensuring availability and scalability of empty “boxes”: the containers. But it matters equally much what you put in these “boxes” and how you stitch them together into a single coherent system. There are too many options today, leaving developers with the task of building a complete application in a more or less ad hoc fashion.

Equal investment in the application layer makes it easier for developers to build complete applications, bring together, complement, and take full advantage of the excellent underlying cloud infrastructure we have at our disposal.

Serverless, sure—but no cigar

The Serverless Developer Experience (DX) has been a considerable step in this direction. In the last year, we have seen many different products, such as databases, message brokers, and API platforms, providing a serverless DX.

It’s all great, but application developers are left with many different SDKs and APIs that need to be understood how to compose creating an integration project and a new bag of challenges to maintain—end-to-end correctness, data integrity, and consistency, ensuring efficiency, scalability, and availability of the system as a whole—is very hard. And systems most often break at their boundaries when trying to compose disparate parts into a cohesive whole.

Meet Kalix!

Kalix is an innovative new category of applications: ultra-low-latency, high-throughput, scalable, always-available, self-healing, and self-adapting distributed applications, delivered through a simple polyglot programming model available to most popular languages today.

Developers only have to care about the domain data, business logic, and APIs. Just three things. They can declaratively define the API for a service (the commands and events it receives and emits), the domain data the service manages (including its constraints, guarantees, and how to query it), and then write the business logic. Once complete, push it up to the cloud, and the rest is on Kalix.

Kalix is a fully managed PaaS for building event-driven, data-centric, real-time, cloud-native applications. Developers never have to care about any underlying infrastructure, including databases, message brokers, caches, service meshes, and API gateways. It provides “vertical integration” and extends serverless by being “databaseless,” reducing complexity and time-to-market immensely.

With businesses measured by the quality of their data, the insights they can get from their increasing volumes of data, and the rate at which they can deliver it to their users, speed has become a competitive advantage getting intelligence and value from your data faster.

Visit kalix.io to learn more or register for a free trial.