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System Initiative Proposes a Paradigm Shift in Infrastructure Automation

9:59 AM   |   15 July 2025

System Initiative Proposes a Paradigm Shift in Infrastructure Automation

System Initiative: Rethinking Infrastructure Automation for the Modern Era

In the fast-paced world of software development and operations, the landscape is constantly evolving. New programming languages emerge, release cycles shrink from months to mere hours, architectural patterns shift, and artificial intelligence is reshaping industries. Yet, amidst this rapid transformation, one critical area has seen surprisingly little fundamental innovation over the past few decades: infrastructure automation.

While tools and technologies have certainly changed – moving from on-premises configuration management to cloud-native infrastructure and containers, supported by tools like Terraform and OpenTofu – the core approach, largely based on declarative configuration management, has remained remarkably consistent since its inception in the 1990s.

Adam Jacob, CEO and co-founder at System Initiative, points out this disconnect. “While the tech landscape has changed, the way we think about building automation has not,” he says. “It’s had an incredible run, but we’ve taken that idea as far as it can go.”

office buildings as infrastructure
Credit: Daniel Fung / Shutterstock

The core concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — managing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files — isn't inherently flawed. It brought much-needed version control, repeatability, and automation to infrastructure management, moving away from manual processes and configuration drift. However, as environments have grown more complex, distributed, and dynamic, particularly with the rise of multicloud strategies and scaled devops collaboration, the limitations of traditional IaC have become increasingly apparent.

Tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, and Pulumi, while powerful, often struggle to provide a truly unified and dynamic view of complex systems. Configurations, typically stored as static files in GitHub repositories or similar version control systems, can become difficult to version, maintain, and keep synchronized with the actual state of the infrastructure. This leads to configuration drift, where the defined state in code no longer matches the reality of the running system, creating instability and requiring significant manual effort to reconcile.

Ryan Ryke, CEO of Cloud Life, a cloud consultancy, highlights this challenge. “The traditional Terraform or OpenTofu model is very declarative,” says Ryke. “You think, ‘I’m going to build my castle!’ But on Day Two, your castle is falling apart because some developer went in and made some changes.” This scenario perfectly illustrates the problem: static declarations struggle to keep pace with the dynamic nature of real-world infrastructure and the collaborative, often decentralized, nature of modern devops teams.

The maintenance burden of IaC at scale is substantial. Static config files require regular review, testing, and updates to reflect changes in cloud provider APIs, service versions, and application requirements. This becomes a significant source of toil for devops teams, diverting valuable time and resources away from building and improving systems towards managing the complexity of the automation itself. Mismatches between the code and the actual infrastructure are a constant source of worry and potential outages.

The Growing Pains of Infrastructure as Code

Implementing and managing infrastructure with current IaC tools often involves a steep learning curve. Engineers need to possess deep knowledge not only of the specific IaC tool and its language (like HCL for Terraform) but also of the underlying technologies and cloud services they are automating. “You have to understand all of the technology before you even think about how you can automate it,” explains System Initiative’s Jacob.

While versioning infrastructure configurations alongside application code in Git provides a history and collaboration framework, the nature of infrastructure changes makes them particularly challenging. Unlike application code, where changes might be isolated to a specific service, a small modification in infrastructure configuration can have cascading effects across multiple components and environments. This increases the risk of breaking deployments, introducing regressions, and creating significant friction in collaboration between development and operations teams.

“Configuration programming is worse than application programming, because, if you get it wrong, by definition it doesn’t work,” says Jacob. This unforgiving nature means engineers often spend considerable time debugging and troubleshooting complex configuration issues, leading to what he describes as “big, long-running conversations with yourself, the machine, and team members where you’re just trying to figure out how to make it all work.”

Ryke echoes this sentiment, stating that IaC often leads to significant toil. “What ends up happening is you spend a lot of time updating Terraform for the sake of updating Terraform,” he notes. This highlights a common frustration: the automation tool itself becomes a primary source of maintenance work. The desire for a more unified and less burdensome approach is strong: “We need some sort of tool to rule them all.”

According to Jacob, a fundamental issue is that the industry hasn't treated infrastructure automation as a distinct, first-class domain with its own specialized tools and paradigms. While fields like architecture have AutoCAD and game development has Unity, devops lacks a comparable standard platform specifically designed for the unique challenges of managing complex, dynamic infrastructure.

System Initiative: A New Paradigm with Digital Twins

System Initiative aims to provide that missing standard, proposing a radical overhaul of how infrastructure is built, managed, and understood. Its core innovation lies in treating infrastructure not as static configuration code, but as dynamic data. This data is used to create living digital twins that accurately model the infrastructure in real time.

Instead of writing scripts or declarative files that describe a desired end state, System Initiative translates infrastructure elements and their relationships into a data model. Actions and workflows, such as restarting a server, deploying a complex application stack, or scaling resources, are expressed as functions within this model. These functions can then be chained together and managed through a dynamic, graphical user interface (GUI).

This visual approach provides a living diagram of the infrastructure that constantly refreshes to reflect the current state and any changes being made. This stands in stark contrast to reviewing static code files, offering a much more intuitive and collaborative way to understand and interact with complex systems.

The use of digital twins allows the System Initiative engine to automatically infer workflows, dependencies, and changes of state. “We’re modeling the world as it is,” Jacob explains. For instance, if a user connects a Docker container to a new Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) instance within the System Initiative model, the platform automatically recognizes this relationship and updates the digital twin accordingly. This dynamic understanding of the system's state is a key differentiator from traditional IaC, which primarily focuses on achieving a declared state without necessarily maintaining a live, interconnected model of the running environment.

The GUI-driven platform simplifies the creation and management of infrastructure workflows. Developers and operations teams can turn common tasks, like deploying a containerized application to AWS, into reusable models with just a few clicks. Under the hood, the platform auto-generates the necessary API calls to the cloud infrastructure, abstracting away much of the low-level complexity that characterizes traditional IaC.

One of the significant advantages of this abstraction is its potential to handle the wide variation in infrastructure needs across different companies and even within different teams in the same organization. Infrastructure often involves bespoke requirements for security, compliance, networking, and deployment patterns. A platform like System Initiative can embrace this necessary flexibility while bringing a much-needed layer of uniformity to how infrastructure is modeled, visualized, and operated, regardless of the underlying cloud provider or technology stack.

The implications for multicloud management are particularly compelling. As more organizations adopt strategies involving multiple cloud providers, the challenge of managing disparate infrastructure silos with different tools and APIs grows exponentially. A visual, data-driven model that can represent resources and relationships across different clouds makes it significantly easier for devops teams to collaborate based on a shared, accurate understanding of the entire environment. This shared visibility and simplified interaction model can help remove bottlenecks, speed up feedback loops, and accelerate the time to value for new deployments and changes.

Real-World Applications: Rocky Linux and Cloud Life

System Initiative is still an emerging platform, but early adopters are already seeing tangible benefits in addressing the limitations of their previous IaC approaches.

Aiding Community Development at Rocky Linux

The Rocky Linux project, an open-source initiative providing a free, enterprise-grade operating system compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is one such user. Following CentOS's shift to CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux emerged as a popular alternative. They are currently leveraging System Initiative to build new infrastructure for their MirrorManager service, which is crucial for every Rocky Linux installation to find the closest package mirrors.

Previously, Rocky Linux's community engineers managed their infrastructure using a combination of tools like Terraform and Ansible, often in a piecemeal fashion. This approach, while functional, lacked extensibility and presented a high barrier to entry for community members who weren't deeply familiar with the specific toolchains and configurations. “It made it very difficult to allow other teams to own their applications,” states Neil Hanlon, founder and infrastructure lead at Rocky Linux.

Although still in the process of adoption, Rocky Linux is already experiencing improvements in collaboration. Hanlon sees System Initiative as a unique solution for open-source organizations like theirs, which operate with decentralized leadership and organization but require crucial oversight and shared understanding of the infrastructure. “System Initiative represents a really unique answer to problems faced by open-source organizations like ours, which have fairly decentralized leadership and organization, but where oversight is crucial,” he says.

Hanlon views the platform as a significant force multiplier for the project. “Having a centralized location to manage, inspect, and mutate our infrastructure across any number of clouds or services is an incredibly powerful tool,” he explains. This centralized, visual approach simplifies complex operations and provides a single source of truth for the infrastructure state. He believes this will allow their security, infrastructure, and release teams to operate with greater confidence and less stress, enabling them to “sleep a bit easier.”

The ability to document infrastructure as a living diagram that is malleable to changes and queryable for historical context is particularly valuable to Hanlon. This dynamic documentation eliminates the problem of stale diagrams and provides real-time insight into the system's state. For these reasons, among others, he believes System Initiative represents a significant step forward and potentially the future of devops practices.

IaC Democratization at Cloud Life

Cloud Life, a cloud consultancy specializing in AWS migrations and IaC for 20 to 30 clients, is another early adopter finding value in System Initiative. Their work involves highly tailored solutions for each client, which previously meant spending years customizing and hacking Terraform modules to meet specific project constraints.

“There was never a one-size-fits-all module,” says Cloud Life CEO Ryan Ryke. The effort required to make a generic module fit the unique needs of the next customer was often prohibitive. This led to a messy adoption landscape for Terraform within their practice, ranging from using public forks to developing proprietary private modules. Some clients even embedded Terraform configurations directly within application source code, making small infrastructure changes require hours of updates and coordination.

Ryke expresses frustration with the complexity and toil involved. “Then, you need tooling, and pipelines, and now, the Terraform ecosystem is enormous,” he laments. All this complexity, he notes, is often just to automate tasks that might take “a five-minute click if I went into the console.” He's grown weary of battling version changes, navigating complex client interactions around infrastructure, and dealing with high project bids for devops maintenance that clients are reluctant to pay for. “It’s infuriating as a business owner.”

For Ryke, the key differentiator of System Initiative is its focus on managing the real-world state of the infrastructure, not just a declarative desired state. “The paradigm shift is that System Initiative manages the real world, not just a declarative state — that’s the big change for me.” This capability has led Cloud Life to make System Initiative their default approach for new projects. They are bundling it into their AWS service offerings and have already used it for six new projects in the last quarter, covering both greenfield deployments and migration work.

Ultimately, Ryke points out that end users and clients are not concerned with the intricacies of infrastructure maintenance tools. “Customers can’t give a shit less about Terraform,” he says bluntly. “They care about the application and where it runs.” By using System Initiative, Cloud Life can hand off a visual, understandable model of the infrastructure to their customers, empowering them to maintain it without needing deep expertise in complex IaC code.

Navigating the Shift: Challenges and Considerations

Introducing a fundamentally new way of working, especially in a domain as critical and complex as infrastructure management, is not a simple undertaking. “We’re fundamentally trying to transform some of the hardest problems,” acknowledges Jacob. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

One of the primary challenges is migration for teams with large, existing investments in traditional IaC tools and prebuilt automations. Because System Initiative represents a fundamentally different model — moving from code-based declarations to a data-driven digital twin — transitioning existing infrastructure and workflows will require significant upfront work and a gradual, iterative approach. Jacob recommends testing the platform with smaller, less critical workflows first, observing how it changes processes, and gradually replacing parts of the existing automation over time. For now, the platform might be most immediately beneficial for greenfield applications or large-scale deployments that haven't yet fully committed to a complex IaC strategy.

Another significant barrier is overcoming preconceptions and resistance within the devops community. “A lot of hardcore people are very put off by it,” admits Ryke, drawing a parallel to the initial hesitancy many felt about moving to the cloud. The idea of moving away from code-centric infrastructure management towards a GUI-driven, data-centric model can be met with skepticism, particularly from those who view “ClickOps” (manual infrastructure management via GUIs) as a step backward. “It will upset the ecosystem,” Ryke predicts.

Jacob is sympathetic to this skepticism, acknowledging that previous attempts at GUI-driven infrastructure management often failed because they sacrificed power and completeness for usability. However, he argues that if a platform can offer the ease of use of a GUI without compromising on the underlying power and flexibility required for complex infrastructure, it can dramatically accelerate operations. “But if you don’t sacrifice anything, they can accelerate you dramatically,” he contends.

From Cloud Life's perspective, Ryke doesn't see any sacrifices in moving to the System Initiative model for their use cases. However, he concedes that it might be overkill for scenarios involving highly predictable and repeatable infrastructure patterns. “When you do the exact same thing every day, the programmatic nature of IaC makes a lot of sense,” he says. Teams with stable infrastructure and well-established IaC practices might continue to thrive with tools like Terraform.

It's also important to note that System Initiative is not the only player pushing to modernize infrastructure management. Other projects and tools are also evolving the IaC space, such as Crossplane, which extends Kubernetes to manage external infrastructure, CDK for Terraform, which allows using familiar programming languages to define Terraform configurations, and the ongoing development of OpenTofu modules as a community-driven alternative to Terraform. Furthermore, the broader trend of platform engineering aims to abstract infrastructure management even further, providing internal developer platforms that hide the underlying complexity from application teams.

As a product in early growth, System Initiative still shows signs of maturity. Ryke notes some friction points but praises the team's responsiveness to fixes. He hopes for improved information retrieval capabilities and broader operating system support in the future. Jacob confirms that expanding cloud support beyond AWS to include Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure is on the roadmap.

Finally, potential drawbacks include costs and the nature of its distribution. While the underlying code powering System Initiative is open source, the product itself is priced. “There is no free distribution of System Initiative,” clarifies Jacob. This proprietary execution model, replacing traditional open-source IaC tools, might be a difficult pill for some organizations to swallow, potentially raising concerns about vendor lock-in.

The Future of DevOps and Infrastructure Management

The software industry has undergone seismic shifts over the past few decades. Yet, the fundamental approach to automating software deployment and infrastructure has remained largely rooted in paradigms developed in a different era. Jacob draws a strong comparison: “The state of infrastructure automation right now is roughly equivalent to the way the world looked before the CRM was invented.” This suggests a need for a transformative change, not just incremental improvements.

A natural question in today's technological climate is whether generative AI could simply solve the IaC problem. Why not just ask an AI to generate or manage infrastructure configurations? According to Jacob, the limitation isn't the AI itself, but the data it needs to operate effectively. “Most people think LLMs are magic. They’re not. It’s a technology like anything else.”

LLM-powered agents require structured, relationally rich data about the infrastructure to understand its state, dependencies, and desired changes. Traditional infrastructure tools, focused on static configuration files, typically do not expose this kind of high-fidelity, dynamic data model. System Initiative, by creating a living, data-driven digital twin of the infrastructure, provides the precise substrate that these advanced AI models would need to operate effectively in the devops domain. Jacob believes that System Initiative and LLMs could be highly complementary, paving the way for greater integration of AI into infrastructure management over time. “If we want that magical future, this is a prerequisite,” he asserts.

In conclusion, System Initiative is proposing a significant departure from the established norms of infrastructure automation. By shifting from managing static configuration code to managing a dynamic, data-driven digital model, it aims to streamline devops workflows, reduce toil, improve collaboration, and eliminate the headaches associated with configuration drift and complex IaC maintenance. The visual interface and real-time modeling offer a compelling alternative for understanding and interacting with complex systems.

However, it is still an early-stage product with limitations, including current minimal cloud support beyond AWS and a limited number of proven case studies compared to mature IaC tools. There is also the inherent challenge of migrating from existing systems and the potential resistance to adopting a proprietary execution model that replaces familiar open-source tools.

Despite these challenges, the core idea — treating infrastructure as a living, queryable, and dynamic data model — addresses fundamental pain points that have plagued devops teams for years. If System Initiative can successfully navigate the hurdles of adoption and expand its capabilities, and if the digital-twin approach proves its value at scale, it could indeed usher in a new era for infrastructure automation and the future of devops.