Advanced CI/CD pipelines for IaC: automating multi-cloud deployments made easy

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a GitOps-powered infrastructure management strategy. It works across cloud providers so it's a key component of successful multi-cloud architectures. Instead of manually provisioning and configuring infrastructure resources, you describe their expected states in versioned code files.

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IaC makes cloud operations more scalable, but it must be automated to achieve its full potential. Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines provide the basic framework for automating your IaC tools, enabling you to run IaC automatically after you commit changes to your configs.

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However, standard CI/CD solutions aren't designed for the unique requirements of multi-cloud infrastructure workflows—CI/CD has historically served the needs of stateless application code. DevOps teams that use traditional CI/CD for infrastructure often struggle to properly integrate their tools, maintain consistency across clouds, and monitor provisioned resources.

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In this guide, we'll explain how to design effective multi-cloud IaC pipelines. We'll highlight a new generation of infrastructure-oriented CI/CD tools that address the problems outlined above. You'll be able to implement advanced workflows that let you scale your operations using multi-cloud deployments.

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Designing CI/CD Pipelines for Multi-Cloud IaC Workflows

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Multi-cloud IaC automation has specialist implementation requirements. It's crucial that you can reliably provision and govern infrastructure across all the cloud providers you use. When done right, multi-cloud improves resiliency, performance, and cost effectiveness, but you need dedicated tools to efficiently manage your infrastructure's state and associated cloud credentials.

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Running an IaC tool like Terraform within a GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, or CircleCI pipeline is a typical starting point. Unfortunately, these traditional CI/CD solutions can quickly prove restrictive when modelling infrastructure workflows. They don't understand infrastructure state so it's easy for conflicts to occur. In general, you must also supply long-lived credentials to enable interactions with your cloud resources.

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As a result, modern multi-cloud IaC workflows are best implemented using the new generation of purpose-built CI/CD platforms. Tools such as Spacelift, Env0, and Terraform Cloud—which we'll discuss in more detail below—are specifically designed for IaC pipelines. They can also directly interface with your cloud providers, solving key security and compliance challenges.

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Multi-cloud IaC must be backed by a robust observability strategy. You need to know what infrastructure is being deployed, by who, and whether it's still required. Any pipeline failures need to be flagged in case they affect your infrastructure's integrity, while configuration drift—where live resources silently transition to an incorrect state—is a constant threat.

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Happily, these issues are also solved by new-generation IaC orchestrators. Because they track your IaC runs, leading solutions both reveal your infrastructure's current state and detect drift by running automated comparisons against your repositories. This gives you one destination to check on your entire infrastructure's health, even when components are spread across different clouds.

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Any IaC CI/CD pipeline must pass rigorous governance checks to prevent misconfigurations and unauthorized rollouts. Including a policy-as-code mechanism in your pipeline's design ensures you can precisely govern your infrastructure, such as by blocking rollouts with missing approvals or incorrect config values.

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This lets you write and version your policies in a similar way to your application code and IaC configs. Policy-as-code is supported by most leading IaC orchestrators, typically via the popular Open Policy Agent engine.

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To recap, successful multi-cloud IaC workflows need five key features:

1. Direct integration with your VCS, cloud providers, and IaC tools, using a GitOps pipeline strategy.
2. Infrastructure state storage and management.
3. Centralized visibility across all connected clouds.
4. Precise security and compliance via policy-as-code engines.
5. Automated drift detection scans that can flag misconfigurations.

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Prioritizing these capabilities means you can efficiently manage your infrastructure without getting stuck in complex tools. Planning how you'll implement these capabilities before you get started makes it more likely your multi-cloud deployments will succeed.

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Popular Multi-Cloud IaC Automation Tools

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As we've discussed above, multi-cloud IaC automation platforms need to support all the cloud providers and IaC tools you use. They must also centralize infrastructure management processes to reduce complexity. Instead of switching between cloud provider consoles, you should be able to monitor your infrastructure workflows within one consistent interface. These requirements are only satisfied by purpose-built DevOps automation solutions.

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Here's a summary of five new-generation IaC tools with multi-cloud compatibility.

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1. Spacelift

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Spacelift is a leading IaC orchestration platform. It runs your IaC tools automatically based on events in your source repositories. Workflows are modeled as "Stacks" that can be easily customized, executed on-demand, or templated into Blueprints for self-service access.

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Spacelift offers direct integrations with AWS, GCP, and Azure. This allows the platform to manage the resources in your cloud accounts, without needing to share any long-lived privileged credentials. Spacelift uses your cloud provider's identity management system to dynamically generate tokens at the time they're required.

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Spacelift also has excellent multi-tenancy support. Its isolated Spaces allow you to separate infrastructure assets by cloud provider, then granularly configure user access. You can visualize all of your deployed infrastructure within the Spacelift web interface, while a comprehensive OPA-powered policy-as-code engine lets you precisely manage when workflows run and what they can do.

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2. Env0

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Env0 unifies infrastructure management processes across different IaC tools and cloud platforms. At a high level, it's similar to Spacelift, but models infrastructure workflows using a different structure of Projects, Templates, and Environments.

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Env0 can integrate with AWS, GCP, and Azure. It lets you track the infrastructure provisioned in your cloud accounts so you can maintain effective oversight of your resources. The platform also provides cost monitoring using data collected directly from your cloud providers, giving you one destination to check your total bill. There's an OPA-based policy engine and support for dynamic cloud credential requests.

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3. Terraform Cloud

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Hashicorp's Terraform Cloud is a managed service that extends Terraform by adding collaboration features and a CI/CD automation layer. It automatically applies your Terraform configs, stores your state, and manages the lifecycles of provisioned infrastructure components. You can view it as a lightweight, Terraform-only alternative to Spacelift and Env0.

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Terraform Cloud can be used with any of the cloud providers available in the Terraform registry, including all major services like AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI, and DigitalOcean. You can also connect to your own private datacenters for hybrid cloud flexibility. The platform supports OPA policies, dynamic cloud credentials generation, and robust variable management. It also delivers table-based visibility into your provisioned resources, although this is less accessible than the graphical dashboards offered by Spacelift and Env0.

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4. Atlantis

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‍Atlantis automates Terraform pull request workflows. It connects to your repositories on leading Git hosting platforms, then automatically tests and applies your Terraform changes based on PR events. Atlantis is designed to deeply integrate with your existing Git flow, such as by providing each PR's terraform plan output as a comment you can view directly within your VCS.

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Atlantis doesn't have built-in cloud provider integrations. Nonetheless, you can use environment variables to specify cloud credentials, then consume them within your Terraform configs. Developers can then apply Terraform changes on demand by creating pull requests, without needing their own sets of credentials.

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Atlantis supports Conftest policies to govern which changes are allowed in Terraform plans. However, the platform lacks built-in visibility capabilities, so you can't see at-a-glance what's currently deployed. It's most suitable for comparatively small environments where you're all-in on Terraform and want a simple self-hosted solution to automate your GitOps process.

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5. Crossplane

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Crossplane is a different type of tool to the options discussed above. It's designed for building control planes that let you orchestrate app and infrastructure deployments across multiple environments. It's modeled on the techniques cloud providers use to manage their own infrastructure.

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Crossplane solves the infrastructure management problems that occur at scale. Standard IaC tools like Terraform support declarative configuration with IaC, but are still ultimately dependent on state locking and imperative operations to actually modify your resources. Crossplane is a true GitOps-native system that continually reconciles infrastructure state using Kubernetes controllers, preventing configuration drift from occurring.

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Crossplane extends Kubernetes with custom resources that developers and operators can use to provision infrastructure components. It enables you to replace separate IaC tools with a standard kubectl apply Kubernetes workflow, regardless of the cloud you're targeting. Major cloud integrations available in Crossplane's provider marketplace include AWS, GCP, Azure, and DigitalOcean.

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How to Implement a Multi-Cloud IaC CI/CD Pipeline?

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Multi-cloud IaC pipeline implementation processes inevitably vary depending on your infrastructure requirements. The configuration for two clouds, with one reserved for use in disaster recovery failovers, will look very different to an enterprise that actively operates resources in four different environments, for example.

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The following high-level steps are designed to provide a simple starting point using Spacelift. Spacelift is an ideal option for multi-cloud workflows because it can directly integrate with cloud accounts and supports isolated Spaces that let you accurately model your infrastructure’s layout.

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1. Write Your IaC Configs

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Use your preferred IaC tool, such as Terraform or Pulumi, to create your IaC config files. You should then commit them to a Git repository, ready to use with Spacelift. Try to keep each cloud's IaC config separate, such as by using aws/ and gcp/ subdirectories, or individual repositories.

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2. Link Your Repositories to Spacelift

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Use Spacelift's "Source code" screen to set up a connection to your GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket Cloud, or Azure DevOps account.

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3. Link Your Cloud Accounts to Spacelift

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Head to Spacelift's "Cloud integrations" screen to create connections to your cloud accounts. Spacelift will then be able to use the connections to generate temporary credentials for your IaC runs. Note that only AWS, GCP, and Azure are currently supported.

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4. Set up Spacelift Spaces

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Spaces group resources and apply access control constraints. Creating a Space for each cloud can help you more effectively manage your resources and understand the relationships between them.

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5. Create Your Spacelift Stacks

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Stacks are where Spacelift's real magic happens. They're what run your IaC tools in response to events such as merging a PR or reaching a scheduled trigger. Each Stack is configured to run a specific IaC tool against a particular repository branch and directory path, using a specified cloud integration. You can assign your Stacks to your Spaces to keep everything organized and governable.

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In our sample multi-cloud scenario, you should create a separate Stack for each of the clouds you're using. For instance, if you followed our suggestion of aws/ and gcp/ IaC subdirectories, then you'll need an AWS Stack that targets the aws directory using the AWS integration configured in your Spacelift account. You can then create a separate GCP Stack that targets the gcp directory and respective Spacelift cloud integration.

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Note: It’s also possible to assign multiple cloud integrations to a single Stack, enabling you to use one Stack to deploy to each of your clouds if you prefer.

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6. Run Your Stacks

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Once you've created your Stacks, you can run them—either on-demand or by triggering configured repository events—to have Spacelift provision all your infrastructure in your cloud accounts. This will happen automatically without needing any static credentials. Spacelift will use your connected cloud integrations to generate temporary credentials that last the duration of the Run.

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7. What Next?

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Once you've implemented your basic workflow, you can proceed to set up policies, Blueprints (templates), and different configuration contexts that enable you to govern your infrastructure at scale. You can also create more Stacks to deploy to additional cloud providers or run another workflow that requires a different IaC tool.

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We've only outlined the absolute basics of modelling multi-cloud infrastructure workflows with Spacelift. You can find much more guidance in the documentation. Other IaC orchestration tools work in a broadly similar way, but may use other terms. They aren't always as cleanly structured as Spacelift's clear Spaces, Stacks, and Runs.

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Best Practices for Implementing Multi-Cloud IaC CI/CD Pipelines

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Now that we've learned the basic requirements for effective multi-cloud IaC pipelines, let's look at some key best practices to ensure success. These tips will help you improve pipeline scalability and defend against compliance threats.

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• Use a secrets manager to share cloud credentials: Dedicated secrets management solutions like Hashicorp Vault store the credentials for your cloud accounts. You can then connect your IaC tools to safely access credentials, without handing them over to developers.
• Implement automated Policy-as-Code governance rules using a cloud-agnostic language: Open-source Policy-as-Code engines such as Open Policy Agent (OPA) and its Rego language are the most versatile option for configuring security and governance policies. OPA lets you decouple policies from infrastructure configuration, making your rules more portable across different cloud environments.
• Centralize monitoring and observability for pipeline performance and deployed infrastructure: Visibility is key in multi-cloud environments. Use centralized, cloud-agnostic observability suites like Prometheus, Grafana, and the Elastic Stack to collate metrics from across your infrastructure, then monitor them in one place.
• Check your CI/CD and IaC tools fully support your chosen cloud providers: Major cloud providers including AWS, GCP, and Azure are well-supported throughout the IaC and CI/CD space, but you should still check compatibility with the specific services you plan to use. Aim to choose tools and platforms that directly integrate with each other, as this will simplify configuration and maintenance processes.
• Continually review your multi-cloud strategy and iterate to improve: Flexibility is one of multi-cloud's greatest benefits. You should regularly iterate upon your strategy by evaluating new cloud services and IaC tools as they become available. Keep access rules, governance policies, and monitoring solutions under review so your infrastructure stays correctly configured.

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Standard CI/CD best practices also apply to IaC pipelines. For instance, you should establish a team culture of CI/CD acceptance and ensure that everyone can easily access pipeline results. It's important that all team members are prepared to resolve pipeline issues as they happen—if an IaC run fails, then infrastructure won't reach the state you expected.

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Summary: Implement IaC Orchestration Platforms to Automate Multi-Cloud Deployments

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Multi-cloud operations improve infrastructure performance, scalability, and cost efficiency. Traditional CI/CD tools make it challenging to implement multi-cloud workflows without impacting governance and visibility, but we've seen that this problem can be solved using the new generation of dedicated IaC automation platforms.

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Solutions such as Spacelift, Env0, Crossplane, and others enable you to consolidate your IaC processes in one place, irrespective of tool or cloud provider. You can use one automated system to manage your entire infrastructure, alongside related governance policies and team access requirements. This enhances operational efficiency and delivers maximum scalability.

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Ready to implement multi-cloud IaC in your organization? At Semantive, we're cloud strategy specialists. Book a consultation to learn how we can unlock your cloud operations potential with IaC, automation, and multi-cloud architecture.