Opportunity - Visual Templates

By Paul Stack
1/6/2025

Lowering the barrier to entry in authoring templates for users is paramount to the user experience we pride ourselves on, here at System Initiative. Recently, we launched Management Functions and the ability to create templates. In this opportunity, we build on those foundations and strive to simplify the creation of templates within a workspace. This post will fill you in on the details, and you can always watch the readout of the opportunity on YouTube.

If this is your first exposure to how we communicate about the ongoing development of System Initiative, welcome! On our docs site, you can learn more about what opportunities are and how we work on System Initiative. You will also find our vocabulary page useful.

Extracting templates from diagrams

Each user within System Initiative has a powerful modeling experience available to them. This means they can build a living architecture diagram of their infrastructure. This opportunity will focus on empowering users to build these living architectures, select segments of them, and extract a reusable template from that segment. Templates enable teams to transform common infrastructure or application architectures into reusable assets. These templates encapsulate higher-level properties that define and control the underlying configuration of individual components. DevOps or platform teams create these templates to empower development teams, providing them with the necessary components to deploy and run their applications efficiently.

Currently, writing templates for complex infrastructure is verbose and cumbersome. A user needs to translate the geometry of how they modeled their infrastructure into a management function, which means opening a development loop of writing the code, testing, and iterating until it's correct. This opportunity will make it much faster to prototype, re-use, and share these templates. A template within System Initiative will be a schema with an attached management function.

Our implementation plan is as follows:

  • The user selects multiple components on the canvas and right-clicks to choose the Extract to Template option.
  • They are prompted to provide a name and additional metadata for the template.
  • The management function collects the selected components, user-specified properties, their positions, and all interconnections between the components.
  • The template is then saved as a new asset, complete with the compositional information, which can be reused within the diagram.

extract to template

When can I expect this to land?

This opportunity has a budget of three weeks, ending January 10th, 2025. You can follow along with our progress by watching our weekly demos, posted every Monday on Discord, YouTube, and our Changelog. You can always find this, and every other active opportunity, in our Road map.

Paul Stack, Director of Product

Paul is an engineer turned product manager who is passionate about the Continuous Delivery and DevOps movements and how they are critical in helping businesses deliver value to their customers.

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