System Initiative today made generally available an automation platform that creates a programmable model of an IT environment to provide an abstraction layer that enables software engineering to employ reactive code to manage IT infrastructure.
Company CEO Adam Jacob said the software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform in effect provides DevOps teams with a high-fidelity digital simulation to map the relationships between the various components of an IT environment. Instead of using infrastructure-as-code using more complex tools such as Terraform, DevOps teams can then make use of small amounts of reactive functions to configure the physical IT infrastructure that System Initiative has mapped, he added.
That approach also enhances collaboration because every member of a DevOps team can use a digital twin to view an IT environment including any proposed changes, noted Jacob.
The System Initiative platform is becoming available at a time when many organizations are starting to embrace platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale. The degree to which organizations will embrace platform engineering will naturally vary, but as DevOps workflows become more automated using platforms such as System Initiative the simpler it becomes for many existing teams to achieve that goal.
In addition, System Initiative provides a better foundation for eventually enabling artificial intelligence (AI) agents to be incorporated into DevOps workflows, said Jacob.
Regardless of the approach to platform engineering, managing DevOps workflows at scale using legacy tools and platforms simply isn’t feasible, he noted.
More than 1,600 developers have thus far tried the System Initiative platform, with 120 end users formally participating in an early access trial. In addition, the modeling platform System Initiative is also available under an open-source license that ensures any investment made by DevOps teams in the platform itself is preserved.
The overall pace at which software is now being developed and deployed has increased greatly as more organizations realize the extent to which they are dependent on applications to drive revenue and increase profitability. The challenge is that many of the tools and platforms in use today were designed for a previous era of software development. DevOps teams now need to focus on eliminating as many of the silos that have emerged in the past decade to enable organizations to build and deploy software significantly faster, said Jacob.
It’s not clear how many organizations are willing to fundamentally change the way they have implemented DevOps. But at a time when more organizations are moving to centralize the management of DevOps, many of them are evaluating their options. The issue is that multiple DevOps teams within the same organization have committed to disparate platforms. Building and deploying applications at scale, however, has proven to be challenging. Nevertheless, enticing them to centralize on a common platform will require not just a compelling technical argument but also a significant amount of political capital. After all, many DevOps teams were created in the first place to escape the restrictions imposed by a centralized IT organization led, for example, by a CIO.
One way or another, DevOps workflows are evolving. The only thing left to determine now is how quickly.