Writing Code About Your Infrastructure? That’s a Losing Race
Writing code about your infrastructure will give way to building models for assembling the automation. It means thinking about how to create systems that people can see and act on quickly, bypassing what historically involved building out diagrams and managing code reviews.
In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Adam Jacob, CEO of System Initiative, compares the new company he founded to a Formula One race car to illustrate how building out models allows for fast simulations that unlock a flow that allows for better collaboration in DevOps and other teams.
If a driver goes to the track two days before the race and tries to tune the car to the specific conditions, then that’s a problem, Jacob said. The driver will lose the race. Instead, the driver and their team build high-fidelity models for the factors that relate to the race — the car tires, the various temperatures of the engine, and the track itself. All those models then get applied to a simulator that digitally runs the car to see how it will perform on the track.
“And so the big idea behind System Initiative is that we’ve built that model for enterprise automation,” Jacob said. “And then, because we have this incredible model, we can then start to allow you to then extend that model in interesting ways, program it, and it makes all the really complicated things you have to do in order to make things work much, much simpler, right? So the problem is still complicated, but the interactions are better.”
Jacob said the System Initiative platform knows how to assemble the components. It knows the relations, providing a fast, multiplayer feedback loop. It pulls together the infrastructure to explain it to others and show engineers how to use it.
“When it comes time to extend the system, you actually can just write code — that is these tiny reactive JavaScript functions that then actually do the automation itself,” Jacob said. So, if you wanted to do things like look at an existing architecture and migrate it to something else, you can write a function that takes in the existing architecture as an input, then transforms the information and writes the new architecture as an output. Then, you would see all of that visually in this magical diagram. It’s very, very cool.”
“So that’s the multiplayer piece of it, right?” Jacob said.
But what about the concept of the digital twin? For that insight, my dear reader, please listen to this latest episode of The New Stack Makers.
