System Initiative Code Now Open Source
System Initiative, the company behind former Chef cofounder and CTO Adam Jacob’s reimagined DevOps tool, has made all its software open source.
“There are no features held back, no competitive restrictions and no special rights retained that would let us change the game in the future. You can learn more about how this works in our Open Source FAQ,” the company said in a blog post. It has been released under the Apache License version 2.0. There is no enterprise version and it is not open core.
Jacob and cofounder Mahir Lupinacci created System Initiative driven by frustration that despite the many good tools available for DevOps workflows, stitching all these tools together still doesn’t guarantee success, he explained to The New Stack previously.
Using the digital twin concept borrowed from the gaming industry, System Initiative enables DevOps teams to build detailed interactive simulations of their infrastructure to rapidly update their production environments.
“Because loosely coupled systems have, by design, no knowledge of each other, it tends to be hard to make them collaborate or share intelligence. Feedback loops can be long, and context switching between different tools can be mind-numbing. Strangely, this setup is not too dissimilar to the siloed departments DevOps was designed to break down!” David Eastman wrote in another article.
The digital twin concept provides a visual representation of common components and their relationships to represent their backend real equivalents. The real objects can be created once the frontend model is ready. Taking a page from multiplayer games, multiple people can collaborate on the work.
The company launched a private beta on June 21. No date has been set to make it generally available.
Along with the open source news, the company released a CLI tool for managing local installations of System Initiative. It’s available for Linux and macOS operating systems. Getting started requires only that you have Docker installed.
“Our decision to open source the System Initiative software is based on our belief that this approach gives it the best chance of achieving the transformational impact we envision. If it is to become more than an interesting concept or a successful product — it will be because the software becomes more than just a vehicle for our success. It has to be a vehicle for your success too,” the blog post states.
“If you’re a DevOps engineer or software developer who thinks it’s time for a second wave of DevOps tooling, and you’re interested in helping to build a better future for yourself, it’s a great time to get involved. There are meaningful contributions to be made and so much we can explore together. If you’re ready to build, we’re ready to build with you.”
Find the source code on GitHub or sign up to try it.
