System Initiative was an infrastructure automation platform built by Adam Jacob (co-founder of Chef) that replaced declarative IaC files and plan/apply cycles with a live, collaborative graph of infrastructure components. Instead of writing HCL or YAML and running a planner, engineers worked in a visual canvas where each asset was a “component” backed by a programmable model.
Each component had attributes, qualification functions (checks that ran as the model changed), code-generation functions that produced provider payloads, and action functions that called out to real APIs. The system continuously re-evaluated the graph as users dragged, connected, or edited components, so validation and generated cloud payloads updated in real time. Changes were staged in change sets that multiple users could collaborate on simultaneously, with conflict resolution built into the model, before being applied to the real world. Asset definitions (for AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and so on) were themselves components that could be forked and customized inside the tool.
System Initiative open-sourced its platform in 2024 under the Apache-2.0 license, but archived the public repository in February 2026 and is no longer maintaining it. It remains a historical reference for teams exploring alternatives to text-file IaC, long plan cycles, and brittle module abstractions.