Platform Engineering’s Role in Fixing Infrastructure Automation

45% of organizations believe they’ve reached a high level of infrastructure automation, but just 14% actually demonstrate mature implementations. That’s the key takeaway from Spacelift’s 2025 Infrastructure Automation Report, a study of 413 IT infrastructure decision makers and influencers. 

So why are so few teams experiencing actual success, while the misguidedly confident remainder preside over a catalog of inefficiencies, risks, and blind spots?

It comes down to a paradox at the heart of infrastructure automation implementation: Solutions need both speed and control. Speed is the ability of various stakeholders to rapidly iterate on infrastructure, whereas control refers to the need for tight security, governance, and cost management. Teams often design processes that favor only one of these priorities because they lack a central framework capable of balancing them both.

Moreover, infrastructure tools are often siloed away from other processes or made inaccessible to developers. If devs don’t know which tools are available, those solutions will likely go unused. Redundant tools create unnecessary cost overruns and security blind spots.

Other challenges encountered with ad-hoc use of infrastructure management tools include:

• No clear way to use tools: Developers may not know how to use new tools or which inputs should be supplied.
• Difficulty accessing or running tools: Available tools become hard to find or may not integrate cleanly with existing workflows.
• Too many duplicated tools: Different teams can inadvertently adopt multiple similar tools for one use case, potentially causing conflicts, mistakes, and confusion.
• Inability to retrieve tool outputs or debug problems: Even when developers can run infrastructure tools, they often lack direct access to the logs, state files, and other outputs that enable effective debugging and incident investigation.
• Missing governance and compliance controls: Compliance teams cannot consistently enforce crucial governance requirements, such as policy checks that would prevent misconfigurations or unauthorized tool use.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Spacelift’s report revealed several strategies top-performing teams use to achieve infrastructure automation success at scale. 

Among them, fully integrating different tools by taking a platform-driven approach stands out as a way to break down silos and improve both speed and control. 61% of Leaders use platforms to streamline their workflows, with 29% having a dedicated platform team, compared with only 45% of all organizations studied.

Let’s take a closer look at how platform engineering naturally complements infrastructure automation.

Platform engineering is the process of building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs). Developers use these platforms to find and run available infrastructure tools. They can then trigger key processes even if they don’t have detailed knowledge about each specific tool.

IDPs allow dedicated platform teams to provide developers and operators with an approved library of infrastructure automation solutions. The model guarantees consistent use of tools while enabling direct self-service access to the entire stack. DevOps team members gain greater autonomy as they can run processes on demand, unlocking infrastructure management speed and efficiency improvements.

Platform engineering also addresses the control side of the speed-control paradox. Making infrastructure automation tools part of a centralized platform means security and compliance teams can ensure governance policies are continually enforced. The platform becomes an intermediary layer between users and the tool library, providing an opportunity to apply access controls and detect misconfigurations.

To summarize, implementing an internal developer platform provides the stable foundation missing from most infrastructure automation strategies. Platform engineering lets you optimize for both speed and control by creating a convenient interface for your infrastructure automation tools.

• Speed: Platform engineering makes infrastructure management quicker and easier by enabling self-service access to preconfigured tools and processes. Having a dedicated platform team maintain a developer-facing portal enables developers and operators to be more productive.
• Control: Platforms centralize governance controls, such as access requirements and policy checks. They also provide visibility into tool usage, enabling platform teams to make informed decisions about which processes are working and which need improvement. These benefits enhance your security and compliance posture and can help reduce operating costs.

Platforms also play a key role in promoting tighter integration between tools. Infrastructure automation fails when many siloed tools are used, requiring team members to take multiple steps to apply a change and then assess the results. 

But an IDP provides a convenient framework for connecting multiple tools into complex processes that can be run with a single click. The platform team can maintain these workflows, then make them available to developers via a self-service portal that requires no specialist infrastructure knowledge.

Spacelift’s report found big differences in infrastructure automation success depending on whether platform engineering and self-service access are used. Organizations with the most effective infrastructure automation solutions are much more likely to use automated platforms, with 83% having a fully automated process including self-service capabilities. 

This compares with the 59% of early-stage Experimenters who are still totally reliant on manual or partially automated systems.

Platform engineering’s ability to solve the speed-cost paradox provides a crucial advantage for DevOps teams pursuing advanced infrastructure automation at scale. 

Here’s a recap of some of the key benefits that leading organizations experience.

1. Centralize tool libraries

Platforms let you consolidate infrastructure tool libraries into a single resource that developers can access autonomously. Infrastructure automation solutions like Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, and Kubernetes each have their own tools and config languages that require specialist knowledge to learn.

 Wrapping these solutions into one-click actions within an IDP simplifies discovery, integration, and ease of use.

2. Provide developer access to operations processes

IDPs enable safe, self-service developer access to key operations processes. Infrastructure tasks such as deploying a compute instance or scaling a database have traditionally been inaccessible to developers, which creates bottlenecks that slow the development process. Platforms democratize access to infrastructure tools within preconfigured governance guardrails.

3. Monitor and constrain tool costs

Centralizing infrastructure tools through platform engineering lets team leaders accurately analyze tool usage rates. Consolidating all resources in one place mitigates the threat of tool duplication and wastage, helping to keep costs capped.

4. Maintain process consistency to prevent drift

Running infrastructure automation tools within a dedicated platform ensures all changes run through one consistent process. This helps avoid conflicts and can prevent infrastructure drift caused by unexpected misconfigurations. 

Moreover, you can use the platform to implement automated drift detection and resolution systems that compare your live infrastructure’s state to your current configuration. 92% of Leaders are already using automated checks to address drift problems.

5. Reduce operational overheads and inter-team siloing

Platform engineering makes infrastructure tools and processes more accessible across different teams. Beyond improving developer autonomy, this also promotes the gradual sharing of skills and knowledge. Having more team members with access to key infrastructure processes helps prevent information siloing and improves organizational resilience.

Platforms also eliminate the operational overheads that occur when developers have to wait for operators to provision new infrastructure. In the report, 75% of Leaders, those most likely to use platform engineering, said their infrastructure automation approaches foster collaboration between teams, compared with only 17% of Experimenters.

6. Detect risks and misconfigurations before changes reach production

Platforms provide more opportunities to detect potential risks before they hit production. Implementing changes within the platform ensures that all changes pass required policy checks and tests. This helps prevent the misconfigurations, security threats, and compliance breaches that hamper less advanced infrastructure automation strategies. 

These were some of the problems most commonly encountered by Spacelift’s survey respondents.

Platform engineering and self-service access are among the most reliable ways to accelerate development velocity while simultaneously reducing infrastructure risks. 

To be successful, infrastructure automation strategies must simplify operations while still providing robust guardrails to prevent misconfigurations and compliance breaches. Platform engineering excels in this area as it lets developers directly interact with infrastructure but only within defined limits.

For instance, solutions such as Spacelift allow you to configure Policy-as-Code rules to detect problems before new IaC configs hit your infrastructure. This makes it safe for developers to commit IaC changes for auto-deploy to production directly. Changes that fail the policy checks won’t be applied, eliminating the risk of a broken rollout or accidental destructive change.

Nonetheless, our research suggests many teams are still hesitant to adopt self-service access. Many believe that allowing developers to engage with infrastructure tools increases risk, but those who do take the plunge discover this isn’t the case. 58% of Experimenters said self-service access increases risk, while just 27% responded that it reduces risk. 

For Leaders, 44% indicated they’ve reduced risk with self-service access, while 42% indicated it creates new risks.

Self-service access risks ultimately arise from missing or sub-optimal platform implementations, often caused by constraints within the platform team. 29% of Leaders have a dedicated team that builds and maintains their IDP, compared with just 7% of all respondents. 

This disparity indicates that most organizations lack the capacity to effectively govern their platforms and the infrastructure automation tools within them, creating a perception of increased risk.

The research shows that investing in platform engineering pays off in risk reductions and accelerated development velocity. Teams gain a single integrated surface to perform infrastructure tasks, while being governed by the guardrails set by the platform team. This unlocks more effective infrastructure automation workflows that are easier to scale as your environments grow.

Infrastructure automation makes DevOps more efficient, but Spacelift’s study shows it must be backed by tools and processes that provide both speed and control.

Using platform engineering to build centralized self-service portals provides the foundation for next-level infrastructure management at scale. IDPs solve the Speed-Control paradox by combining on-demand developer access with continual governance policy enforcement.

Eager to implement your own platform engineering and infrastructure automation strategy? Learn how in our guide, or check out the full 2025 Infrastructure Automation Report to examine the other factors affecting infrastructure management outcomes.