Welcome, Unison Computing—Now in GA!

Since the beginning of time (well, since the advent of cloud computing), software developers have been wrangling programming languages that were never really designed for the distributed web and fixing the gaps in existing infrastructure to improve the experience for anyone working on them.

Hundreds of companies have been started to fix these gaps and solve for the sharp edges. And even with all these products (or maybe because of them?!) building for the cloud today is just … complicated. And not just complicated, it’s bizarre that so much of the work that programmers do isn’t actually programming! It’s stitching together a growing deluge of “cloud native” technologies you’re supposed to use to assemble the Rube Goldberg machine of your overall system.

A microservices graph, drawn as a so-called “Death Star” diagram where each point on the circle represents a different microservice; lines between points represent calls between services (source: Unison.cloud)

A few years ago, functional programming leaders Paul Chiusano, Rúnar Bjarnason, and Arya Irani asked some slightly different questions: what would happen if you started from scratch? Could you build a language and accompanying infrastructure designed specifically for distributed computing? And — most importantly — could programming for the cloud actually be delightful?

Founder fit is extremely important, especially in a product as deeply technical as Unison. The founders are globally recognized experts in functional programming, the intersection of machine learning and software engineering, and are the authors of Functional Programming in Scala (28K+ copies sold). Needless to say, they know their stuff and are deeply passionate about the space.

Unrelated to the future of cloud computing but still highly noteworthy IMO was Rúnar’s mind-blowing live performance of Metallica’s Enter Sandman at the 2023 Uncork Capital Portfolio Summit 🤘🏻

Anyway. Fast forward to today and say hello to Unison , the future of cloud computing.

Unison presents the cloud as a single distributed computer, programmable simply and directly. Instead of many separate programs held together with glue, duct tape, YAML files and JSON blobs, one Unison Cloud program controls the entire “cloud computer”, coordinating hundreds or thousands of nodes. All with zero setup, deployment, packaging, or configuration.

This is all based on the Unison Language, an open-source programming language that developers love: statically-typed, functional, and designed specifically for distributed computing.

While the world certainly doesn’t need yet another elite hobbyist language or “Heroku 2.0”, the Unison language and Unison cloud allow for ground-breaking applications to be built in a fraction of the time and effort versus traditional means.

As an example, check out this write-up of how Paul created a Spark-like distributed dataset library in under a hundred (!) lines of code. But don’t take our word for it. Check out what the community has to say:

• “IMO @unisonweb is the largest advancement in SOTA PLT for distributed systems, since bloom or orleans” ( source)
• “Having spent much time developing distributed systems with tools designed in 70s every time I hear updates from Unison it feels like we still have a chance to make it right.” ( source)
• “I’m convinced @unisonweb will fundamentally change programming 👨‍🚀” ( source)
• “This is beautiful.” ( source)
• “Completely mind blown by the way it changes the way we will do coding and deployment of distributed systems.” ( source)
• “The fact that the industry preaches infra as code but we have this nasty divide clearly shows that @unisonweb is on the right track. Yes, infra should be code, but in your programming lang, not in other 457 half-assed ad-hoc systems” ( source)
• “Gotta say, folks. Unison is brilliant.” ( source)
• “@unisonweb is actually changing the future of programming.” ( source)
• “I am absolutely awestruck, I played with @unisonweb yesterday and I have no words, like peeking into the future” ( source)
• “Everyone excited about the AI revolution, and I’m just sitting here and thinking that @unisonweb will have a way bigger impact.” ( source)

Today, Unison is generally available and free to get started with (and enjoy simple and predictable pricing as you do more).

We’re also excited (much belatedly) to announce our seed investment in the company alongside our friends at Amplify Partners, Good Growth Capital, and Bloomberg Beta. Welcome to the Uncork Portfolio, Team Unison! 🚀