We Rebuilt Cloud Life's Infrastructure Delivery with System Initiative

Summary

By Ryan Ryke, CEO, Cloud Life‍This is the story of how we eliminated static configuration files from our infrastructure workflows at Cloud Life, and, in the process, cut delivery times by more than half, improved reliability, and made our engineers’ work feel much smoother and more manageable.Before this project, we’d been working with the same model that most modern infrastructure teams use: Terraform scripts, config repos, PR reviews, CI pipelines. We’d optimized what we could, but the workflow was still slow and fragile. The turning point came when we started looking for a way to make changes visible and testable instantly, without having to wait for a deployment cycle just to see if something worked.That’s where System Initiative (SI) came in.‍Identifying the Problem: Death by a Thousand DelaysOur engineers were investing a lot of time in what felt like “IaC limbo,” making a change in a Terraform file, waiting for review, waiting for CI/CD to run, and only then finding out if it worked. A simple tweak to a networking rule could take hours to validate.We’d built internal scripts to help, wrappers to handle repetitive resource definitions, diff tools to spot changes, but these just papered over the real issue. The feedback loop was too long.Every improvement we tried boiled down to the same core bottleneckConfig files had to be written, reviewed, and merged before we could see their impact.CI/CD was doing work just to tell us whether the change matched our intent.Debugging meant repeating the whole cycle.The more environments we managed, the worse it got.‍The Decision ProcessWe started a doc to capture our pain points, much like Reddit’s “Decision Doc” approach. We listed every slowdown, every manual handoff, every time we’d had to do a full deployment just to validate a small change.From that list, we built our criteria for an alternative:Immediate feedback on changes.Collaborative editing in real time.Full lifecycle visibility, not just “what changed” but “what ...