System Initiative Secures 18 Million Dollars in Funding to Modernize DevOps Processes

January 7, 2025February 6, 2025 EquityExplained

The promise of DevOps is often touted as a means to bring world-class agility, reliability, and security to the industry. However, in reality, many organizations struggle to implement these ideals, leaving them stuck in the "mediocre middle." Co-founders Adam Jacob and his team at System Initiative believe that the only way to improve practitioners’ lives and outcomes is to rebuild DevOps from the ground up.

Table of Contents

A New Approach: Simulations and Digital Twins

System Initiative’s toolchain is designed to let DevOps teams build simulations of their infrastructure, allowing them to quickly update production environments. This approach enables teams to test configurations without affecting actual production systems, reducing the risk of downtime or errors.

Using System Initiative’s Figma-like multiuser visual interface, infrastructure engineers can create digital twins to model their production systems and test their configurations. The tool will automatically generate code to put these configurations into production.

The Benefits of Simulations

Simulations offer a range of benefits for DevOps teams, including:

Reduced risk: Testing configurations in a simulated environment reduces the risk of downtime or errors.
Increased efficiency: Simulations enable teams to quickly update production environments without affecting actual systems.
Improved collaboration: Digital twins allow multiple team members to work together on infrastructure automation and observability.

A Second Wave of DevOps Tools

Adam Jacob stresses that many enterprises struggle to deploy more than once a week, despite adopting DevOps. To improve outcomes, he believes that we need a second wave of DevOps tools that can fix the user experience of doing DevOps work and reimagine what it’s like to collaborate on application deployment, infrastructure automation, and observability.

The Future of DevOps: A Reimagined Toolchain

System Initiative’s toolchain is designed to be open-sourced, enabling a community-driven approach to DevOps. The company plans to make its core tools available under an open-source license, allowing developers to contribute to the project and improve the overall toolchain.

Private Beta and Funding

The company has raised $18 million in funding, including a $3 million seed round led by Amplify Partners and a $15 million Series A round led by Scale Venture Partners. This investment will be used to further develop System Initiative’s toolchain and make it more widely available.

The Reaction of the DevOps Community

Vlad Ionescu, AWS Container Hero and Independent Consultant, is enthusiastic about System Initiative’s approach: "I love the automatically inferred configuration… I imagine how powerful this would be for complex chains of related resources — a ridiculous amount of configuration and pointless copy/paste work can be completely eliminated."

Conclusion

System Initiative’s toolchain offers a fresh perspective on DevOps, emphasizing simulations and digital twins to improve collaboration and reduce risk. By rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, System Initiative aims to create a more efficient, effective, and user-friendly approach to application deployment, infrastructure automation, and observability.

Key Takeaways

Simulations: A new approach to testing configurations without affecting actual production systems.
Digital twins: Models of production systems used for testing and configuration management.
Open-source toolchain: System Initiative’s core tools will be made available under an open-source license, enabling community-driven development.