General availability of visionary technology platform marks the beginning of a new era of intuitive, powerful, and collaborative DevOps automation
System Initiative announced the general availability of their revolutionary technology for DevOps Automation. Their intuitive, powerful, and collaborative approach replaces Infrastructure as Code and sets the foundation for a series of disruptive innovations across the enterprise technology landscape. The SaaS platform is available to DevOps Engineers everywhere with a generous free tier, simple usage-based pricing, and a welcoming, collaborative open source community.
“System Initiative’s platform has the potential to enable comprehensive automation solutions. This could solidify their position as a market leader and force other vendors to adapt or risk falling behind.”
“With billions of dollars and millions of person-hours invested, most companies still fail to meet the bar set by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond at Flickr in 2009: 10 deployments a day,” said John Willis, co-author of the DevOps Handbook and DevOps Luminary. “The reason isn’t a lack of talent or organizational will – we simply got the fundamental model of how to build the automation wrong. We took our dynamic, complex, ever-evolving technology environment and tried to reduce it to static definitions. We tried to collaborate as if those environments were application source code. The result has largely been systems that are unwieldy, difficult to understand, and brittle. Simply put, they are neither fun to use nor effective in achieving our goals.”
System Initiative today offers the antidote. It has a rich, reactive model that allows infrastructure to be defined and managed as a living architecture. Engineers program the system by writing small reactive functions, making complex customizations easy and dynamic security policy straightforward. Designed to be fully multiplayer, using System Initiative has more in common with Figma and Google Docs than Terraform and GitHub pull requests. It is built on fully open-source software by a company with a deep commitment to Open Source principles and community values. Everything a DevOps engineer needs to get started managing their production infrastructure is included – just a few clicks away.
“In my opinion, much of the infrastructure as code pain comes from the fact that the incumbent tools tightly couple themselves to a version control system. That is, all of the toil of version control systems is inherent in the design of infrastructure as code,” says Matthew Sanabria, SRE. “System Initiative abandons infrastructure as code for infrastructure as models and it’s unlike anything I’ve worked with thus far. Its extensibility and short feedback loops are so refreshing compared to incumbent tools.”
System Initiative improves on traditional Infrastructure as Code solutions through:
- A Living Architecture diagram makes it easy to see the entire infrastructure at a glance and use the relationships between components to automatically derive complex configurations.
- Rich 1:1 Models that make existing knowledge of AWS and other Cloud Providers instantly usable within System Initiative and learning new technologies straightforward.
- Fine-grained control over when actions are taken which makes it easy to recover from failure and react to changing circumstances.
- Always up-to-date change sets allow teams to propose changes, validate the safety and security of their configurations, and keep things up to date as the environment changes.
- Full programmability through writing small, reactive functions. Users model new services in minutes, customize existing models to conform to organizational security policy, and contribute to the community – all from within the application.
- Batteries included – everything a team needs to run a production infrastructure is in the box. There is no need for other platforms, glue code, or state file management. Everyone is on the same page, all the time.
- Fully multiplayer experience means that users can collaborate with other subject matter experts in real-time to teach, learn, and review proposed changes together. What Figma did for design, System Initiative does for DevOps Engineering.
- 100% Open Source. System Initiative is committed to building an open and collaborative community of developers, customers, users, and partners. Transforming the industry doesn’t happen by yourself.
- Simple usage-based pricing with a generous free tier, large enough to run real production infrastructure. It’s simple to understand, easy to predict, and fair.
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“The DevOps landscape is ripe for disruption. With the increasing shift-left trend, teams face many responsibilities without adequate tools,” said Paul Nashawaty, Practice Lead for Application Development, Futurum Group. “System Initiative’s platform has the potential to enable comprehensive automation solutions. This could solidify their position as a market leader and force other vendors to adapt or risk falling behind.”
Backed by $18 million in venture capital from Amplify Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures, System Initiative has seen significant interest from the DevOps community since its open-source release in June 2023. This includes more than 2,900 platform sign-ups, more than 1,600 developers actively trying the platform, more than 1,300 members in the community Discord, and 120 early access users.
“I have spent my entire adult life building and managing complex systems on the internet. I’ve been privileged to work with some of the largest enterprises on the planet, and to fall in love with solving problems at their scale,” said Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative. “We built System Initiative because we knew, from experience, that the path to success with DevOps was simply too fraught with peril. It wasn’t enough to simply improve on the status quo. We needed a completely different foundation to escape the gravity of our past technology choices. System Initiative is that new foundation. The community is hungry for change.”
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