System Initiative (SI) announced a transformative new power tool that reimagines what’s possible from DevOps. Available in private beta, the intelligent automation platform allows DevOps teams to build detailed interactive simulations of their infrastructure and use them to rapidly update their production environments – dramatically improving their day-to-day workflow. The company also announced that it had secured $18M in venture funding, including $3M in Seed funding led by Amplify Partners with participation from Storm Ventures and Battery Ventures, and $15 Million in Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from existing investors. Sunil Dhaliwal, General Partner, Amplify Partners and Ariel Tseitlin, Partner, Scale Venture Partners, sit on the SI board of directors. SI is building an open source, community-driven platform, which is being developed directly and collaboratively with the world’s top experts in infrastructure engineering.
“The possibilities for System Initiative are vast – unlike anything we have ever seen in the DevOps space,” said Tseitlin. “System Initiative’s focus on keeping engineers in that flow state, through visual modeling and faster feedback loops, is a better way of interacting with infrastructure. Mix in the ability to customize and extend the system fully, and you have the beginnings of a transformation in how folks package and share best practices or understand their compliance posture. So much coolness is entering the world.”
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“The DevOps pioneers aspired to bring world-class agility, reliability, and security to everyone in the industry. Unfortunately, the current implementations leave most organizations stuck in the mediocre middle, a seemingly insurmountable distance from our shared aspirations,” said Adam Jacob, CEO and Co-Founder of System Initiative. “System Initiative was born from the recognition that we must be willing to rebuild DevOps from the ground up, rather than stitching together various tools across complex and lengthy pipelines, if we want to improve practitioners’ lives and better the outcomes for the industry.”
“The promise and potential of DevOps has long been at odds with the complicated, difficult to maintain DevOps workflows made up of multiple disparate components,” said Stephen O‘Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “As a result, we’re seeing an increasing demand from enterprises for pre-integrated, carefully designed toolchains that are thoughtful about the developer and operator experiences they deliver. This is the precise opportunity that System Initiative was built for.”
SI’s intelligent simulation reimagines the user experience for infrastructure engineers and provides a near real-time, visual modeling system that uses digital twins to give them the power and control they need. System Initiative provides:
- Focused Collaboration through a fully multiplayer visual interface (like Figma for infrastructure)
- Intelligent Automation that uses the relationships between high-fidelity models to infer configuration dynamically and then automatically writes the necessary code
- Fast Feedback Loops through which each model is qualified for use in real-time, providing immediate insight into the viability of a configuration. There are no state files to track and no ‘plan’ vs ‘apply’ stages – only real-time design and action
- Delightful Customization through writing TypeScript functions – users can change everything about SI from within the platform and share those changes with others
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“SI qualifications are pretty game-changing,” said Mark Imbriaco, long-time DevOps Innovator. “They give me the same feeling that I get using a code editor doing live syntax checking. This dramatically reduces the time spent, when compared to other tools.”
“I love the automatically-inferred configuration,” said Vlad Ionescu, AWS Container Hero and Independent Consultant. “I get exceedingly happy and giddy when I think about how this would work in different scenarios. I imagine how powerful this would be for complex chains of related resources – a ridiculous amount of configuration and pointless copy/paste work can be completely eliminated.”
“Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up is an ambitious task – it requires us all to break the rules we’ve become accustomed to,” said Jacob. “As proud as I am of System Initiative today, I’m most excited about exploring what’s possible when we break free of the constraints we’ve put on ourselves, with the community I love. I would like to thank our investors for sharing our vision for a second wave of DevOps, the developers who have worked closely with us to get the platform to this point, and the legions of engineers who have yet to see it, but will do and build amazing things with SI in the months and years to come.”
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