The Zephyr Manifesto

We dream of a world where cloud applications can be simple.

Over the past 15 years, nearly all software has moved onto the cloud. Cloud computing promised that it would make life simple, free us from server maintenance hassle. Instead, it has become increasingly bloated, esoteric, and complex. Most developers don't understand the nuances and complexities of cloud infrastructure, and the expense of hiring sysadmins has been replaced with the expense of hiring cloud engineers.

Is there a better way?

While cloud infrastructure is complicated, its goals are often simple. My application needs some servers, accessible at a particular domain, scaling up and down on demand. My application needs to be publicly accessible, but also access a database, which is private and secure. I have an event-driven application, and need to pass along messages asynchronously, with guaranteed delivery and retries.

Our goals are easy to express, but achieving them is difficult. We have to choose the right combination from countless cloud options and services, get all the right configuration, and hope that we don't miss any points of failure for security or for scale. It's no wonder we had to create specialized departments for this. But if we need specialists just to manage our AWS, what are we paying Amazon for?

Learning from the Past

Programming itself used to work this way. At one time, all programming was machine code, low-level instructions designed not for the human developer to write in, but for the machine to understand. (And if you've ever read the documentation of a resource in Terraform, you can tell it's designed not for you, but for the cloud provider to understand.) Not any longer.

Of course, we still have to combine the right instructions to implement our ideas. But now we have better tools. Iterators, generators, closures, classes, traits - modern programming languages give us a plethora of powerful abstractions based not on the details of the hardware, but on human ideas. And thanks to compilers, it all runs on that same hardware.

So, what if the cloud had a compiler?

Put another way, what if there were a high-level language for the cloud?