Hello all!
Welcome to the next issue of the Tidy Cloud AWS newsletter! This issue looks at System Initiative's announcement and their tools for DevOps work.
Enjoy!
Infrastructure as model
Recently I listened to Changelog podcast #545, with the title Rebuilding DevOps from the ground up. It is an interview with Adam Jacob, who is has been around in the DevOps space for a long time and was a co-founder of Chef.
He is now the CEO of System Initiative. Their goal is to provide better DevOps tooling while still following DevOps principles.
Read the blog post DevOps without paper cuts to understand the pains and challenges System Initiative tries to address. Their very first public talk around what they do was done earlier this year in February: What if Infrastructure as Code never existed?. This talk focuses on the re-thinking process, and that there is a need to "break the rules" and do things differently. The blog post Five breakthroughs on the path to System Initiative outlines a few key items that they tried and changed to make the whole approach something that would improve DevOps-inspired work.
They discuss digital twins of actual infrastructure, referring to infrastructure as a model.
The software is currently in a private beta, with the intention that it will be open source. What System Initiative will make money on is packaging the whole solution as a coherent and production-ready solution. They compare it to RedHat's business model, which has this type of approach.
I appreciate they do not require you to start from scratch. It can live in parallel with existing solutions. You should, in theory, be able to transition step by step in using this infrastructure as a model approach.
This is thanks to the bi-directional support of infrastructure management via digital twin technology.
I find this a very refreshing approach, and which comes from a different perspective than infrastructure from software. System Initiative is very much coming from an understanding of ops problems, and also the ideas behind DevOps in the first place with collaboration between operations and developers.
Infrastructure from software comes very much from a point of view of making building solutions in the cloud easier for the developer, and trying to make infrastructure transparent/easier to cope with.
The paper cuts in DevOps-related work is something I have in my work most days, so it is nice to see something that may be transformative here.
You can find older newsletters and more at Tidy Cloud AWS. You will also find other useful articles around AWS automation and infrastructure-as-software.
Until next time,
/Erik
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