The question that immediately comes to mind is:

Suppose that for one reason or another, I want to migrate off of the SI platform. Am I able to get any reusable IAC out in some form? Does SI provide any ways to migrate out of the platform? Or do I just have to rebuild all my infrastructure from scratch outside of SI?

How do you control/diff System Initiative resource changes with git? I'm not a fan of GUIs for infrastructure stuff since it's usually harder to review, automate, and roll back to a version other than N-1.

I think you should also talk about the drawbacks, potential roadblocks and failure points. Otherwise it's not possible to make an educated decision on whether to move to SI from, say, Terraform, and as such, we wont. SI is very early days and it's exceedingly obvious there will be a ton of issues with it. Terraform has a ton of drawbacks and it's old tech by now. Provide us information so we can decide whether it's worth dealing with SI issues to no longer have to deal with Terraform issues. Otherwise this is just marketing speak and will fall on flat ears.

This is a very bold take on Infra management which has become a real PITA even at small orgs - Cloud really did a number on us.

One thing I'm personally wondering about is whether I can import my Terraform state file - because that'd be a pretty good starting point for many orgs.

Regardless, I'm curious how this pans out. Though we've had a few different iterations of IaC in the past decade or so, the infra crowd has been known for being sceptical when it comes to adopting new things than your usual software engineer, especially something that is more like a step change than a gradual evolution.

Very happy someone's taking on this task with a very fresh approach.

From the FAQ:

> When you turn infrastructure into data rather than code, you obviously don't want to stick it in Git

Why not? I still do.

Does it have composable, reusable, parameterizable components that allow you to set up similar infrastructure in multiple environments or regions?

Does it have a way to add support for underlying infrastructure that isn't natively supported, similar to terraform provider plugins?

How do you plan on keeping these "simulations" up to date, and consistent with real infrastructure, especially as you add support for more cloud providers?

1. Would you still try to pitch this to someone who is violently allergic to "clickOps" and GUI-centric paradigms? What would you lure them in with?

2. How is a "multiplayer" experience superior to code review-based collaboration flows, in general and for infrastructure work in particular? (I'm someone who values peer review highly and thinks that an independent reviewer improves both the credibility of the process and the quality of the outcome, but who doesn't think a pairing session counts as an objective review.)

It is exciting to see progress in this space and new ways of thinking infrastructure, kudos to everyone!!

My only hope is that we learned and we don't end up managing things like GH repositories or Pagerduty schedules.

Hello! Adam from System Initiative here. Happy to answer any questions. :)

Not to be too negative, but:

> When modeling AWS IAM policy in System Initiative, we realized that AWS provides a sophisticated Policy Simulator. So we modeled it, connected our IAM Policies and resources to it, and had a new, real time interface to test the validity of IAM policy. It took less than an hour from start to finish.

Clicking the link takes you to the docs on policy simulator, which seems to show it’s quite limited and isn’t representative of actual, deployed IAM rules:

> Important:

> The policy simulator results can differ from your live AWS environment. We recommend that you check your policies against your live AWS environment after testing using the policy simulator to confirm that you have the desired results.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_poli...

This seems very interesting, but the resource-hour pricing is a total nonstarter. You're incentivizing me to use as little of your product as possible. You want me to pay for every bucket file, every role assignment, every verification record?

Charge per user or a percentage of cloud spend under management.

If I have existing infrastructure, are you able to generate a diagram/model of the current state given sufficient permissions?

Love the cookie settings section that provides a lot of detail about what cookies are used under what category, and what they specifically do. Never seen that before but it immediately raises trust with the website/organization. I hope this catches on more.

(Off-topic to the post, but since the discussion seems to be dying down anyway, this seemed worth commenting before the post disappears to the back rooms of HN.)

DOA at my current employer because of a lack of support for other clouds (GCP and Azure). I'm sure improved API support is in the pipeline though, very psyched to see SI grow!

I love seeing innovation in this sector. I’ve long felt that there must be a better way than terraform and pulumi. Excited to try it out.

Looking at the website, this is fully open source. Nice! Looking forward to trying it out.

Excited to launch this! All of our early users feedback has been consistent: going back to Terraform after using System Initiative would be terrible.

We're here if you have any questions.

Maybe it could be called System-I.

I did scroll ten minutes on the webpage without still any idea of what it is.

Is there any tldr somewhere?

Yeah, I'm not gonna click around in a GUI to provision infrastructure. Not groping around a console was the whole point of Cloudformation and Terraform. While the UI looks cool and impressive it's a massive step backwards. I can't codegen and document a GUI. Based on the Tutorials it doesn't really solve the 200% problem because very little of this seems intuitive. Which is fine, it's a tool for professionals, investment is an expected exchange for power but I don't think it reaches the bar of "don't have to learn another thing."

The simulator, if it works as described, is huge. Would be worth 5 figures/year/engineer in time saved alone. If I can deploy to a simulator and it's close enough to the real thing that passing means g2g to prod the you have a gold mine. Oh lord, if you could write tests against the simulator and bring first-class unit testing to devops I might cry.