holoway

9 ms·

1.
by holoway 2mo ago
This is fabulous. It captures the feeling of being in the cathedral quite well - it fully transported me back to that spot. Great work!
2.
by holoway 1y ago
It works great. If you think of it as 'dropping all the reasons we chose IaC', then yes - that's obviously dumb. If you think of it as 'getting all those benefits, plus faster feedback loops, AI agents, and an easier pro
3.
by holoway 1y ago
Yeah, in all sorts of ways. You can look at it in a Grid of components. You can look at it in a Map, seeing all the relationships. You can look at it via an API. You can have an AI Agent summarize it for you. It's super transparent.
4.
by holoway 1y ago
Right - obviously, if you need the actual code deployed to run your test, there is not much anyone can do about that. But let me tell you how you would set that up, from scratch, in System Initiative (assuming you have a working deployment
5.
by holoway 1y ago
Nope. Terraform/OpenTofu state has several big differences. The first is that Terraform/Tofu can drift. This is why people suffer when a change gets made outside of IaC, and the statefile no longer tracks. That's because IaC
6.
by holoway 1y ago
For what it's worth, that means hitting the 'apply' button in System Initiative. It's a totally viable workflow - it's not either or, it's 'and'.
7.
by holoway 1y ago
It's absolutely AWS focused today - but one upside of the approach is that building the models is straightforward, because we can build a pipeline that goes from the upstream's specification, augments it with documentation and val
8.
by holoway 1y ago
That's cool. For what it's worth, the software is all open source, precisely because it's critical in this way. I realize that's like telling you that you can take care of this puppy yourself if you want. :) Even if you
9.
by holoway 1y ago
You should check out the site again today - I think it will help at least at a high level of what it's like to use System Initiative today. We didn't recreate the AWS API. Rather than think about it as the API calls, imagine it th
10.
by holoway 1y ago
And yes, there is no more IaC under the hood. However! Folks with big IaC deployments can still use all the discovery and troubleshooting goodness, and then make the change however they want. System Initiative is fine either way.
11.
by holoway 1y ago
Nope - I mean we make a 1:1 model of the real resource, and then let you propose changes to that data model. Rather than thinking of it like code in a file, think of it like having a live database that does bi-directional sync. The speedup
12.
by holoway 1y ago
Ryan can give you more details about his own experience. (I'm the CEO of System Initiative) But a lot of it comes from switching to a model where you work with an AI agent alongside digital twins of the infrastructure. In particular, d
13.
by holoway 2y ago
We're being intentionally pragmatic here. If you're building a digital twin of, say, an F1 car - the complexity of the simulator has to be very high. It's more like building a mock of physics than just the car. With Infrastur
14.
by holoway 2y ago
1. I'm sympathetic to your doubt - I had the exact same doubts, and part of why it's taken us so long to build is we refused to sacrifice what was good about IaC to get "simplicity". If this was ClickOps, they should b
15.
by holoway 2y ago
Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate it.
16.
by holoway 2y ago
To your first question, adding what we call management components is high on the to-do list. They serve this role, in addition to letting you describe workflow across the other infrastructure they manage. You add support directly in System
17.
by holoway 2y ago
The trick is that we’re not replacing programming with the UI - we’re just making it easier to compose things together. Plenty of code in SI - just not the way you write IaC today.
18.
by holoway 2y ago
Yep! The application of Change Sets is a similar moment to record the "why", alongside all the information about what was done. We have more to do here, along with adding things like RBAC that requires review before change sets ca
19.
by holoway 2y ago
This worked in a previous version of SI (we've built like 4 different versions of it over the years) - but we haven't brough it back in to the current version yet. But we absolutely will!
20.
by holoway 2y ago
You can't import terraform state right now. High on the road map ( https://docs.systeminit.com/roadmap ) is discovery of existing resources, starting with the import of individual things, and eventually building the comp
21.
by holoway 2y ago
Thanks! Let us know if you need anything.
22.
by holoway 2y ago
It's a good question! Having a history of how things transformed over time matters. We keep track of that in a couple of ways - one is the graph snapshots themselves, and the other is a raw history log. It's really just another vi
23.
by holoway 2y ago
Rest assured, we'll have more competitive content over time. :)
24.
by holoway 2y ago
All marketing is marketing that will land on flat ears. In the end, you'll have to try System Initiative, see if it is a fit for your use case today, and if it isn't, if it's worth paying attention to tomorrow. I wouldn'
25.
by holoway 2y ago
I mean, we didn't start there - we wound up there :) But yeah, you're not wrong that it's got a lot of inspiration from things like mobx and rxjs.
26.
by holoway 2y ago
Think about it this way - how do you update the IaC from multiple places? How do you visualize drift? IaC grows like code grows - it gets factored differently, it gets abstracted, etc. It's easy enough to imagine how you would update a
27.
by holoway 2y ago
I get it. System Initiative is 100% open source ( https://github.com/systeminit/si ) - if we go out of business, or you are dissatisfied with the product we offer, you can just take your workspace and keep using it. We d
28.
by holoway 2y ago
It's not a bad summary, but it is a shallow one. :) You should love it because it's a more intuitive and more powerful way to build this kind of infrastructure automation. What's happening under the hood isn't just infra
29.
by holoway 2y ago
It's actually pretty good - usually the reason it's not accurate is because enough data isn't being fed to the simulator. That's one of the things that was great about doing it in SI - it wasn't hard to get the data
30.
by holoway 2y ago
Just as soon as enough people use SI that we can have a conference.

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