Introducing Initium — NearForm’s latest Open Source Accelerator aimed at solving the Software Bootstrapping Problem

We’re proud to let you know that today, 8th September 2023, we’ve released our latest open source project, Initium . It’s a combination of a platform and a CLI (Command Line Interface) tool and it reduces the time it takes to get the first lines of code running on the cloud from two weeks to under a day. “Acceleration is at the core of everything we do, we are always looking for new opportunities to improve processes, tools and make teams more productive. Initium focuses on the initial part of software development projects, but it's only one of the many things that NearForm’s DevOps practice is working on. Expect more news from us in the future!” Luca Lanziani, Head of DevOps and Platform Engineering at NearForm.

We created Initium to solve an issue that we and many of the organizations we work with encounter in almost every new project. The issue is that Software and Infrastructure Engineers start writing code almost in parallel, but they get to the first deployable unit at different times.

Infrastructure Engineers must wait for the account to be provisioned, access to be provided, and technology 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.

Initium is our attempt at solving the software bootstrapping problem — this is where you’re unable to start and evolve projects as quickly as you want to.

Infrastructure Engineers can set up the Initium Platform in less than a day in almost any cloud solution. Engineers then have access to an environment with modern, cloud-native functionalities enabled out of the box, while developers can use the initium-cli to set up their repositories and deploy their code on day zero.

What does this mean? Infrastructure Engineers can now focus on building production-ready platforms that are tailored to the needs of their stakeholders and users. Developers can focus on the code and almost ignore things like Dockerfiles, pipelines, etc. The result is that Developers and Infrastructure Engineers are more productive and are better able to bootstrap the projects they work on.

As you’ve gathered, we love open source at NearForm. Indeed, as you can see from this post , we take great pride in being one of the top contributors to OpenJS Foundation projects and the JavaScript ecosystem.

Over the years, we’ve used our wide-ranging technical expertise to help many of our clients bring their ideas to production. We’ve perfected our approach from both a methodology and technology perspective, delivering comprehensive solutions where Product , Design , Data and DevOps work together.

We like to start our engagements with a discovery workshop , using open source software when possible and building software or libraries when needed. We use this approach in our client work and our own projects, such as Fastify .

Fastify is “a web framework highly focused on providing the best developer experience with the least overhead and a powerful plugin architecture”. It’s one of the many examples of how we build great software that leverages open source technologies.

Initium is in alpha stage and like all new open source projects needs more tests and documentation. However, we believe there is no better way to improve something than by opening it up to the world and allowing everyone (that includes you!) to provide feedback.

Feel free to check out the quick-start guide yourself and provide us with feedback.