When Infrastructure as Code met DevOps: Spacelift

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Spacelift is not a SpaceX rival nor a science-fiction fansite. No, it's an innovative infrastructure orchestration platform that has been making waves in the cloud computing industry since its inception four years ago. The company's mission is to streamline the management of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), bridging the gap between provisioning and long-term configuration management.

As Dimitri Vlachos, Spacelift's CMO, told me at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, while IaC tools such as Terraform and OpenTofu have dominated the provisioning aspect of cloud-native environments, Spacelift recognized a crucial missing piece: The integration of provisioning with long-term configuration management.

At its core, Spacelift allows organizations to seamlessly integrate DevOps and IaC programs, including Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Kubernetes, Ansible, Pulumi, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFormation. This multi-tool support sets Spacelift apart from many competitors, providing a unified platform for managing diverse infrastructure needs.

"What we're seeing is an evolution," Vlachos explained. "People start by playing with IaC, then they mature it, and finally, they try to scale it out." This progression has led to a growing demand for solutions that can handle the entire infrastructure lifecycle, from initial deployment to ongoing management and governance.

Spacelift's special sauce in its comprehensiveness. The platform allows users to seamlessly transition from provisioning infrastructure to configuring it, all within a single workflow. This integration extends to popular DevOps tools such as Ansible. 

This addresses a long-standing pain point in the industry: The disconnect between cloud provisioning and on-premises configuration management.

But Spacelift's vision goes beyond mere integration. The company is tackling one of the most significant challenges in infrastructure management: Visibility and control at scale. 

For example, with Ansible, Spacelift's Application Programming Interface (API)-level integration with Ansible playbooks addresses the challenges of visibility and execution speed in the following ways:

• Visibility: Spacelift provides enhanced visibility into the execution of Ansible playbooks, especially at scale. The platform gives users better diagnostics and insights into the status of their Ansible deployments, allowing them to understand where failures are occurring and troubleshoot more effectively.

• Execution Speed: Spacelift aims to improve the speed of running Ansible playbooks at a large scale. By managing the execution of the playbooks through its platform, Spacelift can optimize the process and address the performance challenges that organizations often face when running Ansible across many resources.

The key is that Spacelift's integration goes beyond running the playbooks. It provides a centralized management and observability layer that gives users more control and visibility over their Ansible-based infrastructure automation. This helps address the common pain points around large-scale Ansible deployments.

This focus on observability and governance sets Spacelift apart in a crowded market. The platform provides robust policy controls, allowing organizations to define who can deploy what and under what conditions. This balance between speed and control is at the heart of Spacelift's philosophy, addressing the core tension in many DevOps practices.

In addition, Vlachos said Spacelift is not just "provisioning the whole life cycle of your infrastructure." We allow them to do this in one workflow, go from provisioning your infrastructure to configuring it, and then have a very robust governance layer that allows you to write policies so you can control what gets deployed and who has to approve it."

Using Open Policy Agent (OPA), Spacelift allows organizations to implement fine-grained control over their infrastructure deployments. These policies can govern everything from resource creation and parameters to approval processes and notifications.

Looking to the future, Spacelift is positioning itself at the forefront of hybrid cloud management. While many of their current customers are cloud-native, Vlachos sees a growing opportunity in bridging the gap between on-premises and cloud infrastructure. "We really think hybrid is the future," he stated, highlighting Spacelift's position to offer a unified management solution for both environments.

As the infrastructure management landscape continues to evolve, Spacelift stands out as a visionary player. By combining provisioning, configuration, and governance in a single platform and extending its reach across cloud and on-premises environments, Spacelift is not just solving today's problems; it's anticipating the challenges of tomorrow's hybrid, multi-cloud world.

So, if you don't want a high-maintenance cloud experience, give Spacelift a try. You'll be glad you did. 

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