DevOps is a funny thing.  Over the past 15 years, the term has been used to describe a cultural movement, a category of software tools, and even a job title. (“Try DevOps: It’s a floor wax AND a dessert topping!”)  A simple Google search yields an endless stream of ultimate DevOps guides, research, and frameworks. But at the beginning, the idea was pretty simple: how do we get our software out there faster and more reliably? And when you view it from that lens, I'm not sure we've made much progress.

In fact, Google’s 2022 State of DevOps report shows that 88% of surveyed organizations cannot yet deliver multiple daily deployments, recover from critical application failures in less than one day, or keep failure rates for production application changes below 15%.

Clearly, we’ve got a long way to go.

Regardless of the unsolved challenges, I remain a firm believer in the future of DevOps. A big reason for that optimism is the groundbreaking capabilities launched today by System Initiative. Built on the vision of Adam Jacob, a founder and steward of the DevOps movement, and Mahir Lupinacci, an infrastructure-startup veteran, System Initiative is putting forward a new approach to DevOps that aims to address the myriad of “paper cuts” that have obstructed the path toward successful DevOps practices.

At its core, SI is an automation platform that lets DevOps teams build detailed simulations of their infrastructure with minimal effort. Those simulations can inform and update production environments, dramatically improving those teams’ daily workflows. 

Far from the command-line interfaces of the first wave of DevOps tooling, SI prioritizes user experience for both the individual and the team by prioritizing visual systems modeling and collaboration as core design principles, not as afterthoughts.  

These visual models can then inform intelligent automation - which specifically means that SI can infer a configuration from a model, qualify it in real-time to ensure the configuration is viable and robust, and then produce the necessary code to implement the desired configuration in production.

In short, SI is the power tool that DevOps power users have often been promised but never received.

The best way to experience the power of what the System Initiative team has built is to try it!  To learn more about System Initiative, head over to their site and watch their short demo video or sign up for their private beta launching today. 

Last but not least, we’re incredibly proud to share that Amplify is a proud investor in System Initiative. After leading the company’s Seed financing at day zero, we invested again as part of their recent Series A financing, and are proud to support this amazing team as they usher in a second, and more powerful, wave of DevOps.