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Palumi is aiming to make cloud infrastructure management simpler and smarter for businesses globally. That's the clear message from Aaron Cowell, Vice President of Marketing at the open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) provider, in an in-depth interview about the company's vision, innovations and outreach.

Palumi provides tools that enable engineers to define, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure through familiar programming languages such as Python, Go, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript and Java. This means engineers no longer have to rely on domain-specific languages, which can act as a barrier for many. "DSL-based tools could sort of gatekeep people from using IaC," Cowell said, "so Palumi makes it IaC accessible to everyone."

The platform's versatility spans traditional infrastructure such as virtual machines, networks and databases, as well as modern architectures including containers, Kubernetes clusters and serverless functions. According to Cowell, this flexibility allows users to move rapidly. "You're able to write infrastructure code faster and simpler," he explained. "You can leverage the entire ecosystem of your favourite programming languages using IDEs, plugins and linters. You're also able to get auto-completion, conditionals, loops, all just native parts of every programming language."

This compatibility translates into tangible business benefits. "You're also able to ship applications faster, test and deploy infrastructure as code through your existing code pipeline, all as one thing," Cowell added. "Because you're using programming languages, you can also package your architecture stacks into reusable libraries. This allows you to reduce complex infrastructure to fewer lines of code and enables other developers in your organisation to easily consume them."

One feature Cowell was keen to highlight is Palumi's Automation API, which allows businesses to automate manual infrastructure workflows and manage up to ten times more resources than with traditional IaC tooling. "No one else has this in the industry," he asserted.

When asked for an overview of the company's current product offering, Cowell described a stack that includes core IaC tools, more than 100 packages for cloud and SaaS providers, integrations with common software delivery pipelines, and the Palumi Service for identity, secrets management, and workflow automation. "We have the ability for you to write a Palumi program and provision across all these different clouds," he said. "We integrate with all the common tooling for your software delivery pipeline from IDEs and unit testing to continuous integration and source control."

A major part of the conversation turned to Palumi Insights, the company's newest innovation. "It's really intelligence for infrastructure," Cowell explained. "What we're adding is search, analytics and AI to infrastructure as code, so you're able to really analyse and dig into your organisation's cloud usage and trends. We're able to use AI to reduce your lead time from ideation to delivery."

Cowell described how Palumi customer activity creates a "super graph" of metadata about resources, relationships and configurations which can now be explored directly by users. "You're able to just, you know, find anything in any cloud—ask it questions and it's able to search across all the different cloud resources you have," he said. "You can use structured queries or natural language prompts."

This, he argued, makes tasks like tracking down untagged or costly resources straightforward, and enables businesses to export infrastructure data to warehouses for advanced visualisation and analysis. "You're able to maybe identify anomalies or trends and research things like cost, security, or compliance concerns," Cowell said.

The integration of artificial intelligence within the platform also stands out. "We're allowing you the ability to author infrastructure as code programmes in your favourite programming languages using large language models," Cowell explained. The aim is to automate infrastructure creation and leverage Palumi's understanding of usage patterns to generate recommendations or even code automatically.

Summarising the company's vision, Cowell described a strategy resting on three pillars: "Palumi has infrastructure as code as the core product, the deployments and automation workflow pieces, and then this third pillar, which is just intelligence—the ability to search, analyse and use AI with your infrastructure."

Turning to the future, Cowell said Palumi's product development teams remain "laser focused" on those three pillars. "We want to be the best IaC for anyone and continue making innovations there," he explained. In automation, he said no one else currently offers comparable features for integrating IaC into platforms and services at scale. As for the intelligence pillar, Cowell highlighted Palumi's unique dataset: "The cloud has exponentially grown in terms of what companies have to manage, the number and breadth of resources, different silos… Being able to manage all that for you, let you tap in, really analyse that data, run AI over it—there's just a treasure trove of possibilities that people can get out of this data."

For businesses operating in the Asia-Pacific region, Palumi is already equipped to manage infrastructure on any major cloud provider as long as the relevant services are available locally. "We manage over a hundred plus different clouds and SaaS providers," Cowell said. "If the infrastructure is available in APAC for any of these cloud providers, then Palumi can manage it. We go wherever customers go."

For enterprise customers considering how best to engage with Palumi, Cowell pointed to a range of channels. He encouraged participation in their online community and Slack group, as well as involvement in local Polumi user groups, which are re-emerging as in-person events post-pandemic. The company also maintains an active presence at key cloud and developer conferences worldwide. And with Palumi's open source roots, direct interaction is possible on GitHub. "If you have feature requests or something you need us to fix, we take pull requests and just that, so all these different ways—from physical to online channels—we're all there," Cowell said.

He closed with a call to action: "We really encourage everyone to just come interact with us, come be part of the community."