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Comment by notamy | Hacker News Reader

The question that immediately comes to mind is:

Suppose that for one reason or another, I want to migrate off of the SI platform. Am I able to get any reusable IAC out in some form? Does SI provide any ways to migrate out of the platform? Or do I just have to rebuild all my infrastructure from scratch outside of SI?

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You can export your workspace, and import it into another version of SI. But we aren't producing IaC under the hood - we have a high fidelity modeling layer, and then we allow you to program those models directly.

But if you move off of System Initiative, we don't impact your resources at all. You can just stop using it.

Think of it this way - if you want to "move off of terraform", you're existing IaC isn't useful either (because you need Terraform/OpenTofu to run it). SI is the same.

The main reason I ask is because I use a competitor? of yours currently, and one of the big draws of it is "if we ever go out of business, or if you're dissatisfied with the product we offer, or ..., you can just take all your Terraform and keep using it. You aren't locked in to the platform."

I get it. System Initiative is 100% open source (https://github.com/systeminit/si) - if we go out of business, or you are dissatisfied with the product we offer, you can just take your workspace and keep using it.

We don't make a free distribution of System Initiative - but we expect that someone will eventually, and you could use that.

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