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Overview

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This project is currently in Beta. Please send us feedback!

Introduction​

Initium presents a fresh approach to enable teams to quickly be up and running in a production like environment very early in the project.The unified way Initium merges infrastructure and the software development enables this expedited deployment from the outset. The solution equips the developers with essential tools and monitoring systems essential for maintaining a good software development life cycle, all within a cloud-native context. This document offers a succinct view into the project, its approach, objectives, and advantages.

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Initium - latin from ineō (“go in, make a start”) +‎ -ium, the former from in (“in, into”) +‎ eō (“go”).

The Rationale Behind Initium​

Initium makes engineers and developers more productive.

Initium was created to solve an issue that many organizations encounter in new projects. The issue is that Software and Infrastructure Engineers start writing code in parallel, but they get to the first deployable unit at different times.

Infrastructure Engineers usually have wait for the accounts to be provisioned, access to be provided, and technology stack to be chosen. Only then can they start testing their Infrastructure as Code, and even here the iteration loop is slower than the software iteration.

Developers, on the other hand, can have a simple ‘Hello World’ server ready in less than 10 minutes. However, if they want to deploy this server then they'll have to wait for the infrastructure to be prepared, get access, understand how to deploy the code, write a Dockerfile, create one or more pipelines and come up with a proper workflow to iterate.

It's this combination of a platform and a CLI (Command Line Interface) tool that reduces the time it takes to get the first lines of code running on the cloud from weeks to under a day.

Key Components​

The Initium CLI​

  • Purpose: A powerful Command Line Interface (CLI) tool designed to build and deploy code seamlessly.
  • Features:
    • Provides an efficient workflow and ephemeral environments for PRs.
    • Eliminates the need for Dockerfiles.
    • Avoids the complexities of Kubernetes manifests and the learning curve for developers
    • Automates CI pipeline configurations.

The Initium Platform​

  • Purpose: A robust platform tailored for optimal configuration, offering extensive test coverage for setting up cloud-native platforms, suitable for individual machines or extensive Kubernetes clusters.

  • Features:

    • Observability: Equipped with integrated solutions like Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Open-telemetry for logs, metrics, and traces.
    • Scalability & Flexibility: Enables stress testing and advanced deployment strategies like blue-green or canary deployments using Knative and Istio.

  • Accessibility: The Initium Platform can be accessed on NearForm's GitHub repository.

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