Pulumi Corp., a startup founded by three Microsoft Corp. veterans, this morning exited stealth mode with $5 million in funding and an open-source platform designed to change how enterprises manage their infrastructure.

Today’s leading infrastructure automation platforms require administrators to learn highly specialized configuration languages in order to use them. By contrast, Pulumi provides the ability to manage an environment using the same language used by the service running on top.

The startup claimed this approach has a number of major advantages. For starters, Pulumi spares application teams the trouble of becoming well-versed in a platform-specific scripting or markup language to manage their systems. This eliminates a major learning curve, which should theoretically make it easier for companies to automate their infrastructure.

Another major benefit that Pulumi promised is consistency. According to the startup, its platform provides a unified model for managing the different kinds of infrastructure in use within an enterprise.

Pulumi claimed those features can translate into significant productivity improvements for operations teams. Speaking to TechCrunch, Chief Executive Officer Joe Duffy shared an anecdote of how Pulumi was used to reduce a task that required a 1,000-line script in Helm, a popular application management tool, to fewer than 200 lines.

Pulumi said its automation features lend themselves to both private and public clouds, as well as software container deployments. Enterprise adoption of software containers is growing rapidly because the technology makes it possible to deploy applications in a lightweight portable form. The ability to move code easily among different environments is becoming increasingly essential for companies that rely on multiple types of infrastructure.

Alongside the open-source version of its platform, Pulumi has launched a commercial cloud-hosted edition for enterprises. The offering adds integration with popular software development tools and other advanced features aimed at easing day-to-day infrastructure operations.

Additionally, companies can extend Pulumi’s core feature set on their own by building custom packages for the platform. The system is rolling out with several ready-made packages on launch that focus on automating cloud environments, as well as support for four programming languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python and Go. The startup plans to add Java, .NET and C# to the list in the near future.

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