Spacelift: Lucid’s Swiss Army Knife for IaC

Lucid Software is the leader in visual collaboration and work acceleration, helping teams see and build the future by turning ideas into reality. Its products include the Visual Collaboration Suite (Lucidchart and Lucidspark) and airfocus.

Principal SRE Software Engineer Rocky Olsen spoke to us about the ways Spacelift has enhanced Lucid’s IaC experience. 

Lucid was using an alternative tool to modernize its infrastructure-as-code practices. However, with costs increasing due to price changes and a growing workspace count, the company began evaluating different options. 

As Lucid provides both public and private offerings, it must be able to self-host its CI/CD pipeline technology. Few providers other than Spacelift can do that.

“Spacelift acts as a true partner, not just a vendor, demonstrating a deep investment in our success throughout our collaboration. Their commitment is evident in their willingness to assist with everything from late-night migrations and debugging to resolving complex issues and implementing requested features,” explains Rocky.

Spacelift’s audit trail functionality adds vital control and transparency: 

“The fact that Spacelift tracks every plan and apply, for every PR, in an easily reviewable way, means we have a clear, easily digestible history of every change in our environment.  We can send real-time Spacelift events to our SIEM for review and correlation by our security team.  It’s no longer a black-box running on random developer laptops.” 

Lucid is committed to progressing its IaC capabilities. As Rocky explains, “it’s easy to stagnate at any stage of IaC maturity and neglect further development. However, the benefits of evolving from monolithic workspaces to per-service stacks are significant, including improved engineer experience, reduced impact of changes, and increased development velocity with each progression.”

Infrastructure changes at Lucid currently follow a pull request (PR)- driven process aligned with the SemVer “terraform module” development flow. This flow encapsulates changes and promotes them through different software development lifecycle (SDLC) environments. Planning occurs using the spacelift-to-vcs integration. Keyword owners and relevant engineers review changes before code owners apply them.

Lucid is at what Rocky calls the “awkward junior high” phase of Terraform maturity. The organization has progressed from manual local applies to basic CI/CD, where initial IaC code owners oversee the final deployment steps. 

Only a small group within the internal engineering team has the capability to self-serve infrastructure at the moment, but the aim is to expand this access in collaboration with Lucid’s infosec and software development teams. “Our goal is to provide a flexible and secure IaC approach with least-privilege principles for a wider group,” says Rocky.

Lucid is now transitioning towards a more democratized infrastructure, empowering teams to independently manage their infrastructure. 

The results have already been dramatic: With Spacelift driving Lucid’s CI/CD Terraform workflow, the number of weekly Terraform applies Lucid can deliver has skyrocketed, from 10-20 to 1000-1200. 

“This significant improvement has not only accelerated our deployment capabilities but also greatly enhanced the experience [and sanity] for code owners.”