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**Scott Prutton:** Sure. It's a good question. The way things mostly work now is determined by the relationship between different nodes. So if I have a VPC and I have subnets and I have route tables, and I want to create all of those at the same time, the subnets rely on output from a VPC. I need the ID to know where t... |
**Justin Garrison:** So if I want to delete a VPC, you're telling me System Initiative can properly find the ENI that's still stuck attached to an EC2 instance, and delete it properly? |
**Scott Prutton:** Theoretically... |
**Justin Garrison:** I don't think that's possible, but it would be lovely if that actually happened. I'd say "delete the VPC", and it all cascades properly in order. |
**Scott Prutton:** If it's on the graph, and you can see it, you can queue up the deletes appropriately and make it go. I mean, we're still limited by the nature of physics in AWS APIs, both equally limiting... But yeah, a lot of how things work today is just based on relationships. We've talked about more sophisticate... |
**Justin Garrison:** \[42:10\] And that still assumes that I'm the creator of those nodes, right? Like, I can't point it at my AWS account and say import. Like, you go figure out everything I made. Or can I? |
**Scott Prutton:** Not yet. But that's definitely something that we want to do. Both like importing existing infrastructure, like I want to pull in a single VPC, or like "Hey, walk through my account and bring it all in, and show me what it looks like." I feel like that that's kind of the dream. And we have all the thi... |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense to me, that it was always kind of the dream of Terraform, to like - hey, you technically could do the same thing of "Terraform, go look at the API" and then spit out the HCL that would give me that thing. But a lot of times how those things are structured depende... |
**Scott Prutton:** For sure. |
**Justin Garrison:** And it seems like it could make a lot more sense in a visual, "These things are linked." Whether you need it to be a variable or not doesn't matter. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, absolutely. I think it makes a lot more sense in this kind of model. |
**John Watson:** I really want to reflect back on what you were talking about, Justin... You know, deleting a VPC; there's an EC2 and a subnet, and there's an ENI attached to that EC2 instance, right? |
**Justin Garrison:** The struggle is real. |
**John Watson:** Yeah, yeah. That's a legitimate infrastructure problem. So within System Initiative, we have these things called edges and nodes. So edges are basically what you can connect between different nodes. So your EC2 has an edge for subnet, and that connects to the subnet ID of the subnet component, if that ... |
So imagine in your world, you're like "If I try and delete that whole thing right now, there's nothing that tells the ENI to delete first, because there's no edge." And what you would do in System Initiative, you'd select the whole frame, you'd hit Delete, and it would fail. And then as a user, what do you do? You're e... |
I'm pretty passionate about this, because it's super-empowering. You can legitimately fix that problem in like 10 minutes, contribute it back, and then everyone benefits in the same way you do, in a similar kind of manner to Terraform modules. It's just a lot less like tedious, and you can see the result super-quick. |
**Justin Garrison:** I don't think we have enough time to dig into that collaboration model, because I do think that's really interesting. Not only the collaboration in contributing back to those functions, but the collaboration of two infrastructure people looking at the same diagram, and acting on the same... Change ... |
**John Watson:** Yeah, change set. |
**Justin Garrison:** Change set. So being able to do both of those things adds a lot of questions to me. Contributing back a function in System Initiative to say like "I want to extend this" immediately in my mind, working at enterprises for 20 years, is like "Do I have to get approval from OSPO for this? Is this code ... |
\[46:15\] But then the other thing of just like the speed of learning, of being able to basically pair program on infrastructure at any time with those sort of like share and collaborative links of like "Oh look, here's the picture. This is the change, and this is how it's going to be different. Does this look good to ... |
**John Watson:** So for me, when I joined System Initiative -- Scott, you said you didn't originally completely buy in. For me, I almost was anxious that I couldn't do git branch, write some code... It was safe... You know? And it was like a static reference that I could look at. Whereas in SI, you create a change set,... |
**Justin Garrison:** So where should people go to try it, to use it and say like "Hey, this is the thing. I'm interested in what you're talking about"? |
**John Watson:** So we've got a community of amazing Discord users, that you can join there and have a chat with us, join a call with us. And we're running a pre-release for users, and you can drop us an email, and we'll give you access and you can play and have some fun. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah. Tell them the podcast sent you, and we'll hook you up. |
**Justin Garrison:** The coupon code for free is SHIPIT, and... \[laughter\] |
**Autumn Nash:** The best part about John explaining that whole part that he just did was like you can see the genuine excitement and passion that he has for it. He leaned in, and his face -- |
**Justin Garrison:** He leaned in and brought the mic closer. He's like "You have to hear this part." |
**Autumn Nash:** He leaned in, his face was excited... Like, it's really cool when -- like, sometimes we just have to take a job and you have to do something that you're just building stuff. But when you can be like genuinely excited and into it, you build like even cooler products. So it's really cool that you were ge... |
**John Watson:** I would love to say I'm an amazing actor, but I suck at acting. It's genuine. |
**Justin Garrison:** It's true. |
**John Watson:** Yeah. I'm really, really, really excited for some of the people I previously worked with, and everyone in the community for SRE and platform to try it. And yeah, I'm excited. It should be good. |
**Autumn Nash:** That's awesome. |
**Justin Garrison:** Well, thank you both so much for coming on the show and talking to us all about System Initiative and kind of how that infrastructure works and how you're hosting it yourself. This was great. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah. Thanks for having us. |
**John Watson:** Thanks so much. |
**Autumn Nash:** It was nice meeting you guys. |
**Scott Prutton:** Yeah, you too. |
**Break**: \[49:40\] |
**Justin Garrison:** Thanks again, John and Scott, for coming on the show and telling us all about how the infrastructure works and generally how System Initiative thinks about infrastructure. I like that they're self-hosting, or at least managing the SaaS version with the tool itself, because that dogfooding always wo... |
**Autumn Nash:** Yeah, I thought that was really interesting the way that they're dogfooding their own product, which means they've -- I feel like you catch a lot of bugs and different things that way. And you know that your product -- I don't know, it just makes it a more mature startup to me, because they're using th... |
**Justin Garrison:** Right. When I worked at AWS, everyone came and told me all the things they hate about AWS. I was like "You don't hate AWS as much as the AWS engineers." Because AWS was built on AWS, and they know all of those edge cases, as much or more than any customer. And it's one of the superpowers that I've ... |
**Autumn Nash:** It isn't? |
**Justin Garrison:** And Azure isn't built on Azure, it's built on Fabric Manager. |
**Autumn Nash:** Really? |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah, they don't use their own tools... Which I was always like -- there's this disconnect around "Oh, you should have access to this." It's like "No, you should just build on the thing that you're telling customers to build on." |
**Autumn Nash:** That's wild. I did not know that. |
**Justin Garrison:** Yeah. |
**Autumn Nash:** I also think that you better understand why things are built a certain way when you have to use -- so you start like building something. It's never a straightforward, best practices way. Like, you always try your best and then there's something weird that happens, and some weird edge case, and you have... |
**Justin Garrison:** Right. And you build something for yourself to like say "I want to solve this problem." |
**Autumn Nash:** Yes. But when you're passionate about solving that problem, and you know it's a problem, and then you use it, you have a different buy-in to fix it right, you know? |
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