System Initiative today revealed it is now extending the reach of its digital twin platform for automating the management of IT infrastructure to any cloud computing environment, including now out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean and Hetzner services, along with existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Nick Stinemates, vice president of business development and community for System Initiative, said the company’s namesake platform can now also discover all the application programming interfaces (APIs) being employed across any cloud service.
Armed with those capabilities, DevOps teams can now take advantage of templates to more easily redeploy workloads across those environments using visual tools that are integrated with the core System Initiative platform, he added.
Additionally, IT teams can create disaster recovery plans that span multiple cloud services, noted Stinemates.
At the core of the System Initiative platform is an IT infrastructure automation platform that creates a programmable model of an IT environment to provide an abstraction layer that enables software engineering to employ reactive code to manage IT infrastructure. In effect, it provides DevOps teams with a high-fidelity digital simulation to map the relationships between the various components of an IT environment. Instead of using infrastructure-as-code using more complex tools such as Terraform, DevOps teams can then make use of small amounts of reactive functions to configure the physical IT infrastructure that System Initiative has mapped.
System Initiative has also created a set of artificial intelligence (AI) agents to make its IT infrastructure automation platform even more accessible. Collectively, those capabilities make it possible to both visualize every live resource and relationship, including security and compliance checks and actionable suggestions to improve resiliency and performance.
It’s not clear to what degree DevOps teams are ready to rely on AI agents to manage IT infrastructure, but it’s apparent that, given the number of misconfigurations that exist, existing workflows are deeply flawed. It’s simply too easy for developers using tools such as Terraform to make a mistake. The System Initiative platform fundamentally reduces dependencies on scripts that are simply too brittle to manage IT environments at scale, said Stinemates
Of course, AI agents might also be prone to making mistakes, but there will be fewer of them, especially as those AI agents become more familiar with the specific IT environment they have been tasked to automate using the guardrails that System Initiative provides to ensure they only access relevant data, noted Stinemates.
No matter how IT infrastructure is provisioned, there will always be a requirement for it to be reviewed by a DevOps engineer, he added. The challenge and the opportunity now is to automate the management of IT infrastructure at a level of scale that doesn’t necessarily require a small army of DevOps engineers to build, maintain and document thousands of scripts.
In the meantime, however, DevOps teams would be well-advised to re-evaluate how existing workflows are managed with an eye toward streamlining as many existing processes as possible as the number of workloads that are deployed start to exponentially increase.