Hands-On Infrastructure Management with System Initiative
Session 1: Getting Started & Discovery (60 min)
Intro (10 min)
- Workshop goals and environment setup
- Install SI: curl -fsSL systeminit.com/install | bash
Hands-On: Building Your Digital Twin (50 min)
- Connect SI to a sample cloud environment
- Import existing infrastructure resources
- Explore the visual map of resources, relationships, and dependencies
- Exercise: Use AI to analyze and document what's actually running
- Discussion: Compare discovered state vs. expected state
Session 2: Troubleshooting & Remediation (45 min)
Hands-On: Fix It in Simulation (45 min)
- Introduce a broken service scenario
- Walk through issue identification with SI
- Pull in relevant resources automatically
- Propose and review fixes in simulation mode
- Exercise: Approve and apply the fix
- Debrief: How this changes incident response workflows
Break (15 min)
Session 3: Repeatable Infrastructure with Dynamic Templates (60 min)
Hands-On: From Working to Replicated (60 min)
- Take a working infrastructure setup
- Create a dynamic template from it
- Exercise 1: Deploy to a new region
- Exercise 2: Promote from dev to prod with parameter changes
- Demonstrate importing a new service without breaking automation
- Discussion: Template strategies for HA, DR, and multi-environment
Session 4: Policy Enforcement (45 min)
Hands-On: Three Layers of Policy (45 min)
- Layer 1 - Cloud Provider Policies (10 min)
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Configure AWS SCPs/RCPs to block non-compliant resources
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Layer 2 - Component Qualifications (15 min)
- Exercise: Set standards (encryption, instance types, backups)
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Trigger and review qualification flags
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Layer 3 - AI-Driven Compliance (20 min)
- Write a compliance control in plain English
- Run evaluation against infrastructure
- Review compliance report (SOC 2 / HIPAA / PCI-DSS example)
Wrap-Up & Q&A (15 min)
- Recap of workflows covered
- Resources for continued learning
- Open Q&A
Materials Needed:
- Laptop with terminal access
- Cloud account credentials (sandbox provided or bring your own)
- Pre-configured sample environments for each exercise
