The future of infrastructure-as-code: Spacelift weighs in – News

As cloud complexity rises and AI transforms how teams build and deploy, the infrastructure-as-code community is entering a new era — one defined by speed, structure and smarter automation.

Spacelift Inc. was founded around a simple but urgent insight: Scaling infrastructure-as-code requires more than just Terraform scripts — it requires process, governance and visibility. Simply put, the company was born as a response to the perceived struggle that organizations face in operationalizing IaC at scale, according to Dimitri Vlachos (pictured), chief marketing officer of Spacelift.

“Our technical co-founder, head of R&D, after a career at Facebook and Google, was doing some contracting and he was helping a lot of companies and realizing that the way they were managing their infrastructure with IaC, with Terraform, wasn’t scalable,” Vlachos said. “He actually started to build some tools as a contractor to help organizations with that. That really led into the idea of Spacelift and started to productize that and create a real offering that could help people scale their infrastructure-as-code operations to both have the speed and governance control needed to deliver infrastructure.”

Vlachos spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay for theCUBE’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA coverage. They discussed the evolution of IaC, the growing role of AI and the momentum behind community-driven innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

ClickOps vs. infrastructure-as-code

While they share some operational similarities, ClickOps vastly differs from infrastructure-as-code. First, ClickOps is fast and intuitive but lacks visibility, repeatability and centralized governance of IaC. Secondly, IaC combined with GitOps introduces structure, consistency, pull requests and defined workflows — ideal for production-grade systems, according to Vlachos.

“ClickOps is great for the basic beginnings, but if you’re really going to build a program, that’s where IaC and GitOps come together,” he said. “That’s where you can have a way to repeatedly deploy software, and you have a structure of what you expect to be deployed.”

A key event announcement was Spacelift Intent, an AI-driven deployment workflow designed to merge the speed of ClickOps with the control of IaC. Intent uses natural language to deploy infrastructure — no Terraform, no GitOps pipeline and no code required. Platform teams can also define strict guardrails behind the scenes, giving developers flexibility while retaining centralized control.

“We allow developers or organizations in general, whether it’s lower-skilled DevOps teams or developers, they can connect right to an MCP server that we’ve developed, the Intent MCP server,” Vlachos said. “They’re able, just in plain English or whatever language they’re using, to describe what they want deployed, and Intent will go deploy that for them.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event:

(* Disclosure: Spacelift Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Spacelift nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News