System Initiative (SI) today announced it is making the digital twin tool it developed to manage DevOps workflows available under an open source Apache 2.0 license.

Company CEO Adam Jacob said the approach will enable third parties to contribute to a project that is still early in its development cycle while SI provides commercial support via a subscription service.

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SI has developed a tool that creates a digital twin of a DevOps environment that provides a level of abstraction that makes it simpler to manage complex workflows at scale.

At the core of that effort are models of IT environments created by the SI platform accessed via a visual interface. The automation framework built into the platform uses the relationships between models to infer configuration dynamically and generates typescript code that a DevOps team can then apply to automate a task.

Feedback loops are provided in real-time to give insight into the viability of a configuration, in addition to eliminating the need for state files to track and ‘plan’ versus ‘apply’ stages.

This approach streamlines a lot of the complexity that creates bottlenecks in DevOps workflows in what heralds the arrival of a new DevOps 2.0 era, said Jacob.

In general, SI is making a case for an alternative approach to managing DevOps as the existing platforms and framework are fundamentally broken, added Jacob. Models that create digital twins of DevOps environments represent the arrival of a new era of software development and deployment, he noted.

As more organizations realize their dependency on software to drive digital processes many are then looking to improve the productivity of developers and the DevOps teams that support them. Unfortunately, many DevOps teams are supporting DevOps workflows using custom code that varies widely in quality. Rather than rely on a DevOps engineer to write code, the SI digital twin tool will create code that can be applied more consistently to create DevOps workflows programmatically.

One of the reasons few organizations today have fully automated DevOps across the application development and deployment process is that it’s simply too difficult to achieve using legacy tools and DevOps platforms. It’s not clear to what degree a digital twin approach to managing DevOps will resolve that issue, but when coupled with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities the way DevOps is managed is clearly about to transform.

It may take a while for that transition to occur, but DevOps teams that have historically embraced automation are at the very least going to aggressively experiment with technologies that promise to eliminate much of the drudgery that makes DevOps more tedious than need be. The issue, as always, will be determining which technologies live up to the current level of hype being generated in a way that can be easily adopted.