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**Autumn Nash:** That's really cool. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. So let's go ahead and just go right into the interview, and then we're going to come back and talk about a couple of different topics. Some long reads, as I'm going to label this one. |
**Break**: \[06:18\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Thank you so much, John Watson and Scott Prutten, for coming on the show today to talk about what you're doing with System Initiative, and some things that I've found really fascinating about how you are building it and how you're hosting it. |
**Scott Prutton:** Thanks for having us. |
**John Watson:** Thank you, thank you, thank you. |
**Justin Garrison:** Can you just start usually by -- so we start by what infrastructure or applications or software are you responsible for. |
**Scott Prutton:** So John and I are both responsible for running the SaaS operations of System Initiative. Broadly speaking, it's a pretty traditional app. We have some services, they talk to a database, they communicate to each other over NATs... And we're responsible for making sure all of that, and all of the suppo... |
**Justin Garrison:** If people are listening to other Changelog shows, Adam's been on a couple of times recently on various shows... Can you describe System Initiative for people? We know the rough architecture of it, but what does it do? What's it for? |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, there's a slide that Adam reads out to us every week, that has a really succinct 30-second elevator pitch that I don't have memorized, so I'm going to butcher that... But I like to think of it as like a hands-on way to design and build your infrastructure. I worked as a cloud architect for year... |
**John Watson:** \[08:08\] I think it's - yeah, pretty much what Scott said. There are a lot of tools out there that let you kind of create an architecture diagram, right? But none of them actually let you interact with the architecture. They're separate. So maybe you use Terraform to make infrastructure changes, but t... |
**Justin Garrison:** And a lot of that assumes that, I guess, you have those APIs to do that automation. How would I do System Initiative for on-prem? |
**Scott Prutton:** I mean, effectively, everything we do is a function running on a graph. So if it has an API, we can integrate with it in some meaningful way. So if you think about the diagram, and it's a bunch of boxes with arrows pointing to each other... Let's say the box is an EC2 instance. Under the covers, ther... |
So it's not just AWS that we're managing. You can interact with Docker images... I know that John's been starting to tinker with Google Cloud... There's some other small integrations that we've built... I've built some stuff with GitHub... So if it has an API, if you can interact with it programmatically, we can make i... |
**Justin Garrison:** Where does that border end for "Hey, I'm going to create an EC2 instance, and then I want to SSH in and run a command?" At some point you could do that a variety of different ways, and there are, I guess, API-ish things that kind of expose that. But where do you see System Initiative stopping? |
**Scott Prutton:** I know that Adam has like a lot of opinions about this. We've talked about this specific thing in particular... He would love it where you could click on an EC2 instance and we could just open a shell like right to it. And that is totally possible, because AWS has tools for that kind of thing. I thin... |
**John Watson:** One thing that we haven't really talked about is like the tool is basically like an authoring tool, and an architecturing tool. There's two very separate concerns within the application, that are both key cornerstones to the value proposition. So not to turn this into a sales pitch or anything, but bas... |
\[12:08\] One of the ways that I've been using it is like I wrote a function for us internally that runs an SSM document against all the EC2 nodes in a particular group or function, and hits USR2 code against the binaries that are running, and it will bump the log level, and that's how our internal applications will re... |
**Autumn Nash:** How did you guys end up at the startup, and what did you do beforehand? |
**John Watson:** My story is genuinely true. I was working for another startup in Manchester, and someone in the internal infrastructure engineering chat posted the job and said "Look at this ridiculous, out there, reach for the stars kind of thing that none of us can kind of get", and I was like "Hang on a minute..." ... |
**Autumn Nash:** I feel like you are so much fun, between the fact that you've got a mustache as a joke for a picture, and then that job story... You have to be so much fun to work with. That's awesome. What about you, Scott? |
**Scott Prutton:** I worked at another startup as well, and it was a database company... And it was weird, because -- I don't know, I feel like I didn't really know or care that much about databases, but I worked at a database company, so it wasn't a great fit... But I knew somebody on the inside here that convinced me... |
**Autumn Nash:** I think that's almost good, though... Having different varieties of opinions in the room, and people that are willing to listen, and people that are willing to question you, and to want your product to be better. Maybe if you completely didn't agree with the idea overall, but like - that's how you make... |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, for sure. Like, disagree and commit. Everyone gets a chance to say your opinions, pick the path, and go down the path, for sure. |
**Justin Garrison:** Wait, did you work on Amazon before? |
**Scott Prutton:** No. |
**Justin Garrison:** \[unintelligible 00:14:48.29\] |
**Scott Prutton:** I've read some stuff... Yeah, yeah, yeah. |
**Justin Garrison:** Oh, I'm sorry. I have I have PTSD from disagree and commit for RTO, and... \[laughter\] |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, I worked as like a manager for a while, so I picked up a lot of like fun buzzword sayings that I can throw around when I want to, you know... |
**Justin Garrison:** So at this point you're both there, and you've bought into this idea of what System Initiative can do for infrastructure management so much that you're hosting your SaaS with it. You said you had another version or another copy of System Initiative that is hosting this initiative. So it's kind of s... |
**Scott Prutton:** Yup. |
**Justin Garrison:** You kind of said the basics of it. It was EC2 instances, with NATS in a database, right? |
**Scott Prutton:** Mm-hm. |
**Justin Garrison:** How does that work when you're doing that for a SaaS? Is it a multi-tenant application? Are you running multiple versions per customer? Are you -- I mean, I guess it's coming \[unintelligible 00:15:50.00\] So it's like, you're getting there. |
**Scott Prutton:** \[15:52\] Yeah, we're getting there. It is multi-tenant. There are some version of the future where we might run - I won't say like instance per customer, unless somebody really, really wants that... But maybe some like hybrid, they host part of it in their cloud... Most of the infrastructure is very... |
**Justin Garrison:** You're managing Firecracker yourself on EC2, not doing it through Lambda? |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, exactly. So we built this whole thing - we call it Veritech. Adam and friends are -- whoever builds a service gets to name it. |
**Autumn Nash:** That's awesome. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah. So I can't remember now where Veritech is from, but it's from like an old anime. |
**John Watson:** It's like a robot or something, right? |
**Scott Prutton:** Oh, Robotech, I think. Is that it? |
**John Watson:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Scott Prutton:** So yeah, we have we have a thing called Veritech. It creates cyclones. Cyclones are basically a little server that runs inside of a Firecracker VM, that runs the untrusted code, and then returns the response back to Veritech. So John and I built like a VM instance that we spin up on demand. We have a... |
**Autumn Nash:** What's it like going from solutions architect to infrastructure engineer? Because you're the first person I've ever met that has the same background as me... And I think people side-eye solutions architects and think that they're not super-technical, which is a total lie. But yeah. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, I've done everything. I started in QA, and I was a manager, and I was an enterprise architect, and like a software architect, and a cloud architect... And I was a manager at my last job for like a month, and then the team I was hired to manage was like disbanded. And then they're like "You're a... |
**Autumn Nash:** It's good that you're good at disagree and commit. I think that's an important skill. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Break**: \[18:37\] |
**Autumn Nash:** What are you guys both most excited about with the future, with the startup? Because it sounds like a really cool idea. |
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