You can export your workspace, and import it into another version of SI. But we aren't producing IaC under the hood - we have a high fidelity modeling layer, and then we allow you to program those models directly.

But if you move off of System Initiative, we don't impact your resources at all. You can just stop using it.

It's actually pretty good - usually the reason it's not accurate is because enough data isn't being fed to the simulator. That's one of the things that was great about doing it in SI - it wasn't hard to get the data in to the simulator.

But if I was AWS, I would also say you should check your IAM against the real world, because if you don't, it's pretty easy to wreck you environment. ;)

You don't, because we built the functionality in to the data model - you can review changes (in multiplayer!) and automate things directly in the application. Usually when we're talking infrastructure code, you don't really roll back to an N-1 version. In SI, you would make the changes you want in a change set, it would tell you if it looks like your change would work, and then you would apply the change set to run the actions needed.

This is a great question. Eventually, yes. In an earlier prototype of SI, we actually had this feature, and it was pretty dope. We removed it as we made things much more programmable, but it's high on the road map to bring back. The first will be an `import` function that just builds an individual component from a resource, followed by the full discovery feature.

I can see why you went full GUI to begin with now.

The example component code reminds me a lot of mobx-state-tree (you have no idea how much cog. diss. I get reading the docs for that thing given they acronym the name everywhere ;) though I find myself much preferring the API shape of mobx-keystone at this point.

(I've been experimenting a lot with reactive graphs of late though while it seemed an obvious thing to try at some point I haven't attempted to wire it up to systems automation yet; shall have to do my usual cover-to-cover documentation read on your site and then hopefully I'll be in touch with a baseline to actually chat about that part ;)

First, I have to say this looks awesome. I am in awe at the level of effort I imagine is required to build and maintain something like this.

That being said, I find the rationale a little bit confusing. I rather love IaC, and consider a GUI or no-code/low-code tool to be more of a dead end (not for any fundamental reason, but for more practical reasons) than plain text. I do really appreciate the problems solved by the simulation approach, but to me these two things are orthogonal. I feel like you could have a product that functionally does what your product does, but with a plain text interface. I appreciate that you're really going for something different here, but I am sure I am not the only person who feels this way.

maybe it's because i'm not in the devops space but i'm 4 paragraphs in and i still don't know what this is about?

So, my hot take on this is that it's an advanced GUI for AWS with change management built in.

1. Is that a good summary? 2. Why would I pick this?

I know you LOVE it, it's your baby. But why should I love it? :-)

I'm not a Tik-Tok child and have an attention span long enough to focus on coding longer pieces. However, I shouldn't be required to read all this wall of text to understand what this product is about. Could you summarize it in 4 sentences: what it is and why I should use it (instead of X or Y)?

It absolutely is. We're adding more resources all the time, we hang out in Discord and build the things folks need most. We're working on GCP now.

I'm privileged to have had the opportunity to help the team build the Production SI SaaS platform, leveraging SI itself to create all the infrastructure. I'd be happy to chat with anyone interested in how it works and share findings.

I think all great companies have names that are also great band names. System Initiative is a better band name than System-I. :)