I read through the blog post and entry page twice each - yeah still confused. The pitch reads like an engineer celebrating their implementation.
What I took away is: it’s a collaborative IDE for infrastructure? with some nifty simulators to catch issues earlier, and “somehow” changes are managed outside the popular git+pipelines workflows?
There are elements of this that I like (faster validations that CDK deployments ). Those aspects are bundled with confusing, either unnecessary or poorly communicated, other elements. “Replacement for IaC” - is there a new paradigm? Or is IaC just now a graph in this local application? Because you tout being able to program new service models, so the code isn’t gone…
Not to me. It says "System Initiative is an Intuitive, Powerful, and Collaborative replacement for Infrastructure as Code" but I still don't understand what it does or why I would want to use it.
They get to it if you scroll! I came to the comments with the exact same concern, but they eventually spell out the value-add in (IMO) very clear terms:
First, we turned everything into data - a rich system of digital twins that enable safe, easy simluation of changes, and map 1:1 to the upstream resource.
Second, we made it all programmable and reactive by modeling it on top of a hypergraph of functions. When one property on a model changes, anything dependent on that property automatically re-calculates.
Third, we built a multiplayer user interface that makes working with the model fast, safe, and fun.
Seems cool, though I'm far from needing it. AFAIU: it's an attempt to build a reactive infrastructure system from the ground up using a cute Functional Programming paradigm, not just building off of code-like YAML files like we do today.
Personally the GUI gives me flashbacks to the dark days where "programming" in my mind was "using Eclipse", but that's a biased take! I can see why WYSIWYG-style functionality was considered too fundamental to make optional.
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.
What I took away is: it’s a collaborative IDE for infrastructure? with some nifty simulators to catch issues earlier, and “somehow” changes are managed outside the popular git+pipelines workflows?
There are elements of this that I like (faster validations that CDK deployments ). Those aspects are bundled with confusing, either unnecessary or poorly communicated, other elements. “Replacement for IaC” - is there a new paradigm? Or is IaC just now a graph in this local application? Because you tout being able to program new service models, so the code isn’t gone…