Kablamo open sources tool to speed up AWS development

Cloud engineering specialist Kablamo has developed an open source tool called Kombustion that it hopes will speed up development across multiple AWS environments.

The company described Kombustion as "another layer of intelligence" for AWS CloudFormation, the cloud giant's infrastructure provisioning and management tool it says allows users to manage infrastructure as code.

Kablamo said the project is a pre-processor for CloudFormation that reduces the time and complexity of managing code in AWS, particularly when multiple CloudFormation templates are used without needing to rewrite current templates.

As an example, Kablamo said that setting up a virtual private cloud in AWS could mean using up to 30 different AWS resources, which Kombustion could establish with just a small amount of configuration.

“We developed Kombustion to help solve a common challenge for all AWS CloudFormation users," Kablamo co-chief executive Allan Waddell said.

"It was built in-house, and we’d been using it ourselves, but after seeing the benefits Kombustion delivered to our team, we decided to open source the project and share it with everyone. Our Kablamo values align strongly with the open source software community and we are proud to play our part in making AWS an even better experience for its users.”

As an open source project, Kablamo's cloud lead Liam Dixon said Kombustion's core functionality had been built but hopes the AWS community can improve on it.

“Different AWS users have different ways of pre-processing CloudFormation templates, but we saw the opportunity to develop a freely available tool with the potential to become widely used in Australia and overseas.”

“Kombustion’s publicly available, plugin-based approach, means that the AWS developer community can reduce rework and share best practices in areas such as security, network design and deploying serverless architectures.”

Last month, Kablamo recruited Rackspace Australia's former general manager Angus Dorney to lead the company as co-chief executive alongside Waddell.

Kablamo started gaining traction when it was founded in 2017 by working with media companies as its first customers, but has since then branched out into cloud transformation services for enterprise customers.