System Initiative Stalks HashiCorp Out of Stealth

System Initiative, a startup targeting platform engineering and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), today officially launched its platform designed to help DevOps engineers build cloud infrastructure using an intuitive interface.

The company’s software-as-a-service platform, called System Initiative, aims to rival market solutions such as HashiCorp’s Terraform and Pulumi by allowing engineers to design cloud infrastructure using a collaborative “multiplayer” approach. The company will also adhere to an open-source model with a free tier and usage-based pricing for premium.

System Initiative was founded in 2019 by Adam Jacob, Alex Ethier, and Mahir Lupinacci. Jacob, the CEO and Chairman, is well-known in the developer community as the original coauthor of the Chef automation tool as well as the cofounder of Chef Software, which in 2020 was acquired by Progress Software for $220 million. Chef created a series of products designed to help developers automate repetitive tasks.

"IaC is hot and getting hotter,” Jacob told Futuriom in an interview. “It's because people need it. The problem is real. We need an answer to this problem, especially in the large enterprise."

Multiplayer IaC

The System Initiative team has strong opinions about existing IaC platforms, saying in interviews and public statements that existing tools have challenging user interfaces and are tied too closely to version control and proprietary coding environments. They say that System Initiative is designed to take automation a step further, giving developers and engineers an easy interface to create and manage cloud infrastructure, likening the approach to enterprise software such as Google Docs or Figma, which enable real-time collaboration in an intuitive interface. The company calls this approach “multiplayer” (see image below).

Source: System Initiative

Jacob is outspoken about the IaC market so far, saying it has “failed to deliver.” He believes that System Initiative will help DevOps teams speed up the deployment of software, while validating the safety and security of their configurations. The platform uses a digital twin model of replicating infrastructure in the cloud, keeping things up to date as the environment changes.

The launch of System Initiative comes at an interesting time. Pulumi just announced a new security product as well as record usage statistics, and the most well-known company in the market, HashiCorp, is being acquired by IBM (the deal is expected to close by year-end).

"Fine-grained" Control

Matthew Sanabria, a system reliability engineer with Cockroach Labs who is a beta user of System Initiative, says System Initiative has more developer-friendly characteristics to make it easier to manage cloud infrastructure.

"Much of the infrastructure as code pain comes from the fact that the incumbent tools tightly couple themselves to a version control system," said Sanabria. “That is, the toil of version control systems is inherent in the design of infrastructure as code. It’s time to think about this differently.”

Sanabria says that System Initiative helps by enabling developers to build sophisticated customizations tied to existing APIs. It’s flexible, says Sanabria, because it enables code to be built into the platform to make adjustments to the infrastructure in real time.

“I don't see anything like System Initiative out there,” said Sanabria. “It is more fine-grained. This is an infrastructure modeling approach, like building a graph.”

That being said, Sanabria told me that Cockroach also uses Terraform and Pulumi for various use cases, and even if System Initiative is adopted, it won’t necessarily replace the other tools across the board.

“The whole infrastructure as code market is not any one tool right now, there are many of them,” said Sanabria.

System Initiative is backed by $18 million in venture capital from Amplify Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Storm Ventures, and Battery Ventures. The company says the platform has had 2,900 sign-ups since its release in June, with more than 1,600 developers actively trying the platform.