[holoway]

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, debugging speed improves because you can ask the agent questions like:

`I have a website running on ec2 that is not working. Make a plan to discover all the infrastructure components that could have an impact on why I can't reach it from a web browser, then troubleshoot the issue.`

And it will discover infrastructure, evaluate the configuration, and see if it can find the issue. Then it can make the fix in a simulation, humans can review it, and you're done. It handles all the audit trails, review, state, etc for you under the hood - so the actual closing of the troubleshooting loop happens much faster as well.

[AOE9]

When you say 'digital twins of the infrastructure' you mean another deployed instance? So if they'd just made a preview environment created upon a pull request they'd have just got the same speed up.

> It handles all the audit trails, review, state, etc for you under the hood.

So there is no more IaC SI now manages everything?

[holoway]

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 in validating the change happens because we can run it on the data model, rather than on 'real' infrastructure.

Then we track the changes you make to that hypothetical model, and when you like it, apply the specific actions needed to make the real infrastructure conform. All the policy checking, pipeline processing, state file management, etc. is all streamlined.

[AOE9]

Ah okay thank you for clarifying!

Personally not my thing, I'd rather be testing on real infrastructure rather than a simulation.

[holoway]

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'.

[AOE9]

Yes hitting apply would update the production infrastructure, but what if I want to run automated testing to check a change/new feature? I can't do that on a simulation.

[holoway]

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 at all).

I assume the use case here is 'I want to deploy the application on every pull request to net-new infrastructure, then run my test suite, and destroy the test infrastructure once the PR is merged or the code is updated'.

You would fire up the AI Agent and ask it to discover an existing deployment of the application. Probably give it a hint or the boundaries you care about (stop at the network layer, for example - you probably don't want to deploy a net new VPC, subnets, or internet gateways). Once that's done, you'll have a model of the infrastructure for your application in System Initiative.

Then you'll turn that into a repeatable template component, by either asking the AI to do it for you, or selecting the related infrastructure in our Web UI and hitting 'T'. You'll add some attributes like 'version' to the template, and plumb them through to right spot in the code we generate for you.

Then you're going to call that code from our GitHub action on every PR, setting the name and the version number from the branch and the artifact version, naming the change set after the PR as well. You'll let the action apply the change set itself, which will then create the infrastructure.

The next step will be to run your tests against the infrastructure.

On merge you'll have another GitHub action that opens a change set and deletes the infrastructure you just created, so you don't waste any cash.

Notice what I didn't tell you to do - figure out how to create new state files, build new CI/CD pipelines, or anything else. Just started from the actual truth of what you already have, used our digital twins to make a repeatable template out of it, then told the platform to do it over and over again with an external API.

Hope that helps it make sense.

[stackskipton]

So you recreated Terraform/OpenToFu state?

[holoway]

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 tools are by design unidirectional - change should only ever flow from the IaC to the Infrastructure. In SI, this is fine - the resource state can update, and then you can decide if it was beneficial (at which point we just update the component side of the equation, and you're done) or not (at which point you would decide what action to take to revert the change.)

The second is how it gets generated. In Terraform/Tofu, it's a side effect of the 'apply' phase - basically a compile time artifact. In System Initiative it's the heart of the system - the code you write is operating on that model, not generating that model. This makes programming it much simpler. You can change the model through our Web UI, you can change it through an API, you can change it with an AI Agent, the resource can change because the underlying cloud provider changes it, and it all just works.

[stackskipton]

State can drift in SI as well unless you are subscribing to events from AWS that alert your system as soon as resource is changed so you can update your side.

>the code you write is operating on that model, not generating that model.

What are you talking about? That model is not reality because reality is whatever the state of resource is in AWS. If your model says my S3 bucket is not public but someone changes it in AWS to make it public, who cares, it's public and that's what's important. Sure, your system may update itself more frequently than only when I run "tofu plan/apply" but at end of the day, it doesn't matter.

All I'm saying as SRE, you have done poor job selling this to me. I'm telling you what I would tell my boss if he came to me with this product.

"This is some custom IaC system with AI Agents sprinkled on top. I guess if you want to get rid of SRE team and replace us with their consultants, whatever, I won't be here to care. If you want us as SRE team to use it, nope, it's a waste of money since OpenToFu has much better support. Can you approve my SpaceLift purchase instead?"

[ryanryke]

> Sure, your system may update itself more frequently than only when I run "tofu plan/apply" but at end of the day, it doesn't matter.

Correct me if I'm wrong here. In my experience you have to "apply" before state is updated. This would mean we weren't quite operating on the source of truth. (aws in this case).

100% it's a solvable problem with a TF centric tool chain. But it's still a problem that needs solving.

In my experience with SI it fades to the background. Now, I'm sure there is an edge case where someone edits something outside of SI while I'm trying to simultaneously update it in SI where things might break. I haven't run into it yet.

> All I'm saying as SRE, you have done poor job selling this to me

Can't argue this, but I would say like any other new tool, it's worth checking out. :)

[holoway]

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.

[AOE9]

Personally moving away from IaC is a big yikes, for something so critical to my company no way would I let myself be locked into your product. I have already been bitten before when a developer productivity startup fails/pivots(as they often seem to do).

[holoway]

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 don't move away from IaC, you can still get benefits from the approach by having SI discover the results, and then do analysis.

[lawnchair]

I noticed on your open source page it says:

> You can make a build that includes our trademarks to develop System Initiative software itself. You may not publish or share the build, and you may not use that build to run System Initiative software for any other purpose.

That feels a bit different from what many developers expect when they hear "open source." Nothing wrong with that, just pointing it out.

https://www.systeminit.com/open-source

[AOE9]

Sorry maybe my last reply was a little harsh now I understand it isn't a priority IaC under the hood anymore.

I still have major reservations around dropping IaC and just working on a simulation of what is deployed, I don't see how this can work for more complex deployments such as multiple region/AZ deployments, blue/green deployments, cell based deployments etc etc. Seems like dropping IaC would only work for very simple environments.

[holoway]

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 programming model' then.. not so much.

[esseph]

No, not another deployed instance.