Why DevOps Engineers Recommend Spacelift

Managing infrastructure at scale, deploying it, and handling drift is pretty hard to do alone. DevOps engineers have to use so many tools nowadays, and no one can hold the same depth of knowledge in all of them.

As humans, the possibility of making an error is very likely, even when we are doing our best to stay fully attentive. Given the number of complex things we are managing, this is unavoidable. Or isn’t it?

You cannot guarantee that an engineer’s code will not create unauthorized resources by reading thousands of lines by hand, so you need a policy to enforce it. Collaboration is hard, even with version control. Deploying production code from multiple machines leads to configuration breakdowns. Managing infrastructure across different tools complicates the choice of a CI/CD tool and turns workflows into a maze.

A unified approach to deployment, especially for teams that use multiple IaC tools, removes that friction and delivers better organizational results.

First, let’s see the features that make DevOps engineers reach for Spacelift in the first place.

End-to-end deployment workflow

One of the key reasons DevOps engineers love Spacelift is its ability to automate many tedious, time-consuming infrastructure management tasks.

Spacelift automates your deployments end-to-end and gives you full control over what happens before and after any operation using Stacks. That frees engineers from manual infrastructure work so they can focus on higher-value tasks.

Achieving true GitOps

GitOps is now one of the core paradigms for managing cloud-native services. Commonly used when it comes to managing cloud-native services, GitOps refers to the fact that you are using your VCS as the single source of truth when it comes to managing your infrastructure, meaning that whenever you make a change to the git repository, that change will be reflected in the environment you are targeting.

With Spacelift, you do not have to define complex CI/CD pipelines to deploy your code. Your changes deploy when you push them, so you get true GitOps out of the box.

Broad tool and provider integrations

Spacelift works with the tools your team already uses, so it fits into existing workflows instead of forcing new ones.

On the IaC side, Spacelift supports OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), the Serverless framework, Kubernetes, and Ansible. It integrates natively with the major version control systems (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps) and cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud), and it uses dynamic OpenID Connect (OIDC) credentials so you do not have to store long-lived cloud keys.

Beyond that, Spacelift connects to Slack and Microsoft Teams for notifications, Infracost for cost estimation, and tools such as Datadog, ServiceNow, and Docker. See all integrations.

Policy as code with Open Policy Agent

Spacelift integrates with Open Policy Agent (OPA) and takes policy as code further than most tools. You can create several types of policies:

• Login policies control who can log in and who gets admin rights.
• Approval policies create run reviews and approval flows that respect your organization’s security requirements.
• Notification policies route notifications for your Spaces to your notification inbox, Slack, or your webhooks.
• Plan policies give you control over your infrastructure plan: deny the creation of specific resources, review cost estimates, and block a deployment when its cost exceeds your threshold.
• Push policies define the actions to take in response to pull and push events in your VCS.
• Trigger policies build complex workflows by creating dependencies between Stacks. For most cases, use the newer stack dependencies feature instead.

OPA does more than sharpen your policies. You can use it to shape your workflow until it fits your needs exactly. Spacelift ships with best practices by default, so you get a solid starting point, and you can build from there into a workflow that is genuinely your own.

Bring your own workers

Workers run your IaC tasks inside containers. Those tasks include deploying code, updating resources, and running before-and-after actions in your workflow.

Creating your private worker pools is another key feature that Spacelift offers.

By default, you can use the public workers that Spacelift provides, but you might have a security requirement that calls for private workers instead. At Spacelift, we understand that you have full flexibility to opt in to either one of the choices, and configuring private worker pools isn’t that big of a deal due to the fact that we are providing everything you need to do it on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Kubernetes.

Private module and provider registry

Terraform’s public registry is fine for getting modules and providers, but most organizations end up building their own modules to address internal security concerns. Spacelift offers a private registry for modules and one for providers. What sets the module registry apart is that you can write test cases for your modules and extend them with hooks.

For more information, you can check this blog post on Spacelift Module Registry – What It is and How to Use It.

Drift detection

Drift happens all the time, so how do you deal with it? Doing it manually does not scale, because you cannot monitor everything all the time. One can argue that you can build a script that compares your infrastructure code with what is happening in your infrastructure and run it on a cron job that notifies the right people.

But then you have to reconcile the drift, which causes its own headaches. And those scripts need maintenance, which adds overhead for your engineers.

That is a lot of work, and it usually breaks somewhere.

Spacelift handles drift detection out of the box. It detects infrastructure drift automatically and, optionally, reconciles it based on your IaC. All you do is set the interval at which Spacelift checks your infrastructure for drift, which the documentation walks you through.

Spacelift Intelligence and Intent

AI changed how developers ship code, and it changed what they expect from infrastructure. When every change follows the same slow process, the platform team becomes the bottleneck. Spacelift Intelligence closes that gap by combining IaC and GitOps with an AI infrastructure assistant and an AI-based deployment model.

The Infra Assistant lets you understand, design, deploy, and govern infrastructure in natural language. You can ask what is deployed and by whom, get architecture guidance grounded in your existing stack, and write policy as code in plain language.

Intent is a no-code, AI-based deployment model built for speed. Developers request infrastructure through their LLM using the Spacelift MCP, and Intent turns that request into governed infrastructure actions with the same policies, credentials, and visibility as your IaC workflows, without the Terraform ceremony.

You keep IaC and GitOps for mission-critical systems where you want maximum control, and use Intent for tests, proofs of concept, and other low-risk work where you want maximum speed.

Other capabilities

Apart from everything mentioned above, Spacelift also lets you share variables between Stacks and mounting files to them using Contexts.

You should most definitely use Spaces throughout your account to delegate partial admin rights, control access to your Stacks at different levels, and share resources between isolated environments.

Templates give you governed self-service. Your platform team defines what can be deployed and how, and developers deploy it themselves without needing to understand the underlying IaC. Every stack a Template creates stays managed by that Template and cannot be edited by hand, even by admins, so environments that are meant to be identical stay identical. Each one is traceable to a specific Template version and set of inputs, which keeps deployments consistent and auditable at scale.

Spacelift has its own Terraform provider, meaning that you can literally manage Spacelift with Terraform, making it easy to replicate all your configurations to a new account.

Before I share our customers’ stories, here is my honest, unbiased opinion of Spacelift, formed before I ever started interviewing here. I was not even looking to change jobs. I fell in love with the product, and that is what made me apply.

I had worked with Terraform daily for years and never felt the need for a tool on top of it, even though I used Terraform Cloud at a previous job. Spacelift changed my mind. You can read my take here.

One of our customers ran Atlantis, and promoting a change across all their environments took seven pull requests. That was slow and error-prone. They also had no drift detection and little visibility into their process.

Spacelift took them from seven pull requests to one. Drift detection gave them visibility and cut the risk of errors.

“Spacelift has let us get down to a single pull request per change across all environments. We have drift detection, and we can easily see when changes are pending across all components when they have failed, so we have a lot better visibility than before. Spacelift has greatly reduced the time we spend dealing with CI/CD for Terraform…”

Alex Siegman, DevOps Engineering Manager at SpotOn

Read the full story.

Spacelift’s flexible setup and configurable guardrails helped another customer fix problems in their IaC process. They wanted auditing, security scans on their code, tighter access controls, and least-privilege enforcement. They also needed to run Terraform at scale without error-prone processes. Spacelift covered all of it.

“I was impressed with Spacelift. It felt much more coherent than the competition…We don’t have to worry about fiddly, error-prone, manual deployment processes, which used to plague us like they plague many companies…It’s automating a lot of that grunt work and getting rid of a lot of the toil involved in managing infrastructure systems.”

Alex Jurkiewicz, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Lightspeed

Read the full story

Another customer, Lansweeper, moved to Spacelift for its flexibility. Their platform team supports developers across an on-premises product and a cloud product with a GitOps-first workflow.

They left Terraform Cloud after its pricing shifted to a resource-based model and support slowed down, evaluated several alternatives, and chose Spacelift because its policies, dependency orchestration across stacks, and overall model fit the way they already work.

They have since moved fully to OpenTofu and grown the resources they manage as IaC from about 6,000 to more than 24,000.

“You don’t need to adapt your way of working to Spacelift: You can adapt Spacelift to the way you work.”

Ismael Piñeiro Ramos, Platform Team Lead at Lansweeper

Read the full story

One customer was growing fast and running into process challenges that came with the growth. They wanted consistent run environments, audit capabilities, and the ability to hand off approvals for runs. As they surveyed the market, they found products similar to Spacelift that were missing features, but they were also missing something else: they did not listen to customer feedback.

At Spacelift, customer feedback shapes every feature we build. Our release cadence is fast, and we ship the features our customers actually need. You are notified in your Spacelift account whenever we release something new, so you never have to go looking for it.

“Spacelift is a tremendous time saver for me, and that in turn makes our entire development and deployment process smoother and simpler. Spacelift is like the final stitching on a football; it neatly ties together all of our infrastructure in a way that makes life really simple for our developers – and for me.”

Eric Berg, Lead DevOps Engineer at Brace

Read the full story.

Price matters too. Spacelift has no hidden costs.

There is an always-free plan with no credit card and no time limit, plus Starter+, Business, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ tiers, and you can see what each includes on the pricing page. The paid plans come with a free trial, so you can evaluate Spacelift before you commit. Customers consistently point to our transparency and our response time.

“All the support people have been very helpful, but it really does all come back to speed and affordability — which are the big pluses for Spacelift.”

Alex Norell, Head of Infrastructure and Security at Odos

Read the full story.

More recently, larger engineering organizations have told the same story. Figma runs almost entirely on AWS and manages hundreds of infrastructure stacks with Terraform and OpenTofu.

Before Spacelift, provisioning something like an S3 bucket could take up to six pull requests applied across multiple modules in a set order over several days. With Spacelift, it takes one. Just as importantly, their developers and platform teams can now see what is changing, where a change is in the rollout, and where it might fail.

“We recommend Spacelift as a product for anyone who’s using Terraform heavily.”

Owais Ahmed, Engineering Manager at Figma.

Read the full story

Duolingo tells a similar story about scale. Running Terraform on Atlantis, applying 500 directories took five days and did not scale past a handful of concurrent plans. After moving to Spacelift, the same work finishes in a few hours, and the platform team stopped babysitting the tooling.

“The thing that really sold Duolingo on Spacelift was the fact that it is deeply customizable. Duolingo is really particular about some things, so if there’s something that the Spacelift platform can’t do directly, there’s always been a way to pivot slightly and do whatever we want. Having that flexibility makes it very easy to extend and customize the platform. And that’s really nice.”

Evan Strat, Senior Platform Engineer at Duolingo

Read the full story

Other case studies

If you want to read more about how Spacelift is helping other organizations all over the globe, you can check out some other stories from our customers.

Engineers’ Direct Feedback from Slack

 

People are thrilled with Spacelift. We built it to make DevOps engineers’ lives easier, and some customers have gone further, letting their developers run end-to-end deployments with no DevOps involvement at all.

Security, observability, and infrastructure management are all easier with Spacelift.

In conclusion, Spacelift is a valuable tool for DevOps engineers, as it helps them manage their infrastructure more efficiently and effectively.

With Spacelift, DevOps engineers can automate manual, time-consuming infrastructure management tasks, improving efficiency and freeing up time for more important work.

Spacelift also supports collaboration and teamwork, enabling teams to work together to manage infrastructure more effectively.

Security is very important to Spacelift, and the ability to control access, resources that can be created, and perform actions based on pull/push and other integrations makes Spacelift a strong choice for engineers worldwide. You don’t need multiple tools to handle your deployments across the IaC tools you support in your organization today. You don’t even need to build complex CI/CD automations for these tools, since Spacelift handles deployments without all that fuss.

That is why DevOps engineers recommend Spacelift, and why it is becoming an essential part of their toolkit.

If you want to learn more about Spacelift, sign up for free or book a demo with one of our engineers to understand our product’s capabilities.