I hate this kind of descriptions. I have no idea what this does and the page didn't explain it. Forwards me to read a blog post that I am sure won't be there in say 6 months?
If your software requires a blog post to be understood perhaps your reason to exist is not really that important?
I read the entire blog post and still have no better understanding of what System Initiative is than I did before.
The post was written by the CTO (former founder and CTO of Chef). It mentions at the highest level how DevOps has succeeded since 2009, then it complains about how our tooling is practically unchanged since then. This results in “death by a thousand papercuts,” which System Initiative aims to solve!
Visiting the website[1] provides a better overview of the purpose/goal. It seems like an opinionated configuration of a stack of existing tooling that can be extended in typescript.
Edit: seems like there’s something novel going on with building a graph of the infra, and having a GUI to collaboratively manipulate the infra through.
Thing is, as bad as some of the tooling and the general experience of building a platform on top of it may be, the real problem is not technological.
What impedes most organisation from deploying often is not that the software or the infrastructure is bad.
It's that the organisations themselves get lost in kafkaesque processes and made up compliance requirements, lack of really good leadership and general vision of where they want to be.
When people and processes get out of the way, all you need is a few competent engineers and good leadership.
Reading the one pager on the site got me nowhere with what specific problem it wants to solve and how it solves it. At least the video clarified that, but I had to watch a 5 minute video.
Anyways, the tool does look neat for greenfield projects to collaborate getting things stood up (especially when trying to work with management who wants big pictures), but I’m dubious on how it will work with large existing systems or over the tedium and nuance of day to day maintenance. Once you flesh it out and stand up initial, how to you plug, say, CI/CD into it? What about multiple environments?
Re the video and the "paper cut" of having to look up the latest ami for cent OS: with a conventional system, would one not merely specify "latest" and it'll use the latest image, depending upon support in the API?
If your software requires a blog post to be understood perhaps your reason to exist is not really that important?