Little has emerged in recent years to challenge the dominance of Terraform as an infrastructure coding tool. Although alternatives such as Pulumi, CDK and, more recently, Wing have emerged, Terraform's modular, declarative paradigm has proven to be the most enduring. Indeed, all of these approaches share the common goal of modular code creating monolithic infrastructure. System Initiative is a new, experimental tool that represents a radical new direction for DevOps work. One way to view System Initiative is as a digital twin for your infrastructure. Interactive changes to the System Initiative state result in corresponding change sets that can be applied to the infrastructure itself. Likewise, changes to the infrastructure are reflected in the System Initiative state. One of the great advantages of this approach is the collaborative environment it creates for things like application deployment and observability. Engineers interact with System Initiative through a user interface that has a graphical representation of the entire environment. In addition to managing the cloud infrastructure, you can also use the tool to manage containers, scripts, tools and more. Although we're generally skeptical of these kinds of GUI tools, System Initiative can be extended to handle new assets or enforce policy via TypeScript code. We really like the creative thinking that has gone into this tool and hope it will encourage others to break with the status quo of infrastructure-as-code approaches. System Initiative is free and open source under an Apache 2.0 license and is currently in open beta. The maintainers themselves do not recommend the tool for production use yet, but we think it’s worth checking out in its current state to experience a completely different approach to DevOps tooling.
