System Initiative with Adam Jacob

The Developers' Bakery

Today we talk about a completely new topic: DevOps and System configuration. I’m really excited to have on stage Adam Jacob, CEO and Co-founder of System Initiative.

Adam is challenging the status quo of DevOps tools with a completely new approach to system configuration. While System initiative looks like a no-code tool at first, it comes with all the power of TypeScript to let you build and manage your infrastructure in a completely new way.

We will talk about the history of System Initiative, the challenges of building a new tool in a crowded space, and the future of DevOps.

Adam is also the co-founder of Chef, a really popular configuration management tool, and he will share with us some of the lessons learned from that previous experience.

Enjoy the show 👨‍🍳

Show Notes

• 00.00 Intro
• 00.46 Episode Start
• 01.03 Adam’s Introduction
• 03.19 What is a System Initiative?
• 07.54 What are the System Initiative feature?
• 11.16 Is this a drag-n-drop tool to create AWS infras?
• 14.37 No-code tools & quality of their output
• 20.12 Frontend engineers doing DevOps?
• 23.06 How is System Initiative doing Open Source?
• 25.18 The history of System Initiative
• 34.10 From demo to production
• 36.13 AI & DevOps
• 39.18 What you learned from building Chef?
• 43.51 Further reading
• 45.06 Where people can find you online?
• 46.07 Sysadmin in disguise

Resources

• systeminit/si on GitHub
• System Initiative Official Website
• System Initiative Discord server
• Talk at Config Mgmt Camp 2023 - What if Infrastructure as Code never existed
• @adamhjk on GitHub
• @adamhjk on Twitter
• @adamhjk on Mastodon

Show links

• Podcast Website
• The Developers’ Bakery on Spotify
• The Developers’ Bakery on Apple Podcasts
• The Developers’ Bakery on Google Podcasts
• @thebakerydev on Twitter
• @cortinico on Twitter