Reducing operational complexity: How Spacelift simplifies DevOps management

DevOps accelerates software delivery workflows by tightly integrating development and operations teams. Automated tools and processes such as CI/CD and IaC improve development velocity, but managing them can quickly become complex at scale. It's hard to see what's running, enforce governance policies, or assign access to just the right people.

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Enter Spacelift: a single platform for provisioning, configuring, and governing your infrastructure using CI/CD and IaC. Spacelift combines automated infrastructure management with streamlined collaboration features.

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It enables on-demand self-service access, clear visibility into running resources, and centralized policy-as-code control. The platform reduces DevOps complexity, giving teams more time to focus on meaningful tasks.

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This article will explain some of the key ways in which Spacelift simplifies DevOps management. We'll share how Spacelift boosts productivity by eliminating manual workflows and clunky context switches between different tools.

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How does Spacelift fit Into DevOps?

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Spacelift automates and orchestrates IaC tools using a modern CI/CD-based approach. It works with Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, and more, allowing you to run all your IaC workflows in one place.

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IaC automation is traditionally implemented by running commands like terraform apply within a CI/CD pipeline script. However, this is clunky and difficult to govern, especially in large environments where many IaC configurations are used.

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Spacelift eliminates IaC complexity by connecting directly to your source repositories. Instead of manually writing CI/CD pipelines, you can create a Spacelift Stack that runs automatically when code is changed or PRs are merged. Spacelift reads the IaC files in your repository, applies them to your infrastructure, and keeps track of the deployed state.

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How Spacelift simplifies the DevOps loop

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Spacelift reduces DevOps complexity by enabling robust infrastructure and configuration management. It's more than just an automated CI/CD tool for IaC: Spacelift also includes robust observability, governance, and DevOps lifecycle management features, all within one cohesive platform. It supports you to consistently hit your DevOps KPIs at scale.

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Let's explore some of Spacelift's main features to see how they simplify DevOps processes.

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GitOps-Powered IaC automation

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IaC automation forms Spacelift's core. The platform models IaC workflows as Stacks, essentially a combination of IaC source code, infrastructure state, and configuration properties.

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Each Stack is connected to a repository in your GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps account. Spacelift automatically triggers a run of the Stack when events occur in the repository, such as pushing new commits or opening a PR. You can customize the events that each Stack responds to using policies.

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Stacks prepare, plan, and apply infrastructure changes automatically. They use your selected IaC tool to compare the config in your repository to the current tracked state of your infrastructure. You can then confirm the generated plan to deploy the changes.

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There’s no need to manually implement any complex CI/CD pipeline scripts—creating a Spacelift Stack gives you a powerful, fully automated workflow for provisioning your infrastructure.

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Simple Cloud provider integrations

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Safely managing cloud credentials is one of the most common pain points experienced by DevOps teams. Running tools like Terraform and Pulumi within a traditional CI/CD pipeline requires you to supply credentials that permit infrastructure access.

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Security best practices mean each credential should be individually scoped and regularly rotated, but this is difficult to scale. DevOps teams lose sight of which pipelines are using credentials and depend on error-prone manual processes to maintain them.

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Spacelift neatly solves this problem by natively integrating with AWS, Azure, and GCP. Instead of making you set credentials statically, Spacelift uses your cloud provider's built-in identity management system to automatically generate short-lived access tokens.

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Each time a Stack is run, Spacelift creates a new set of temporary credentials in your cloud account. Those credentials will be passed to the run as environment variables, allowing IaC providers to interact with your cloud resources.

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For example, Spacelift's AWS integration creates an IAM role that the AWS Terraform provider automatically uses to authenticate. This drastically reduces the admin overheads faced by DevSecOps teams when securing IaC cloud credentials.

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Clear visibility into your infrastructure

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Poor visibility into active infrastructure is another common DevOps challenge. If you can't see what's live, it's harder to diagnose problems and reduce waste.

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Conventional CI/CD systems aren't aware of the infrastructure that your IaC tools create, so once the pipeline finishes there's no way to check the status of your resources. You have to manually login to your cloud accounts, requiring more credentials and context switches.

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By contrast, Spacelift provides built-in visibility because it goes beyond automating your IaC tools. It also tracks the state of your infrastructure, allowing you to visualize the resources your Stacks have created.

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Spacelift's Resources screen displays a hierarchical view of provisioned infrastructure, making it easy to monitor what's deployed and check which Stack created each component.

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You can see at-a-glance whether infrastructure is running correctly, or if there's redundant resources that could be removed to save costs. Viewing your entire infrastructure landscape right alongside the Stacks that created it simplifies management by ensuring no details are overlooked.

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Centralized governance controls with Policy-as-Code

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It's essential that the DevOps loop is protected by precise governance controls. Infrastructure should only be accessible to people who actually need to interact with it, while accurate enforcement of approvals, rejections, and conditions is needed to ensure changes only deploy when relevant criteria are met.

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For instance, you may specify that live infrastructure only uses resources from a particular hardware tier and changes must be applied by specific users.

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Spacelift includes a powerful Policy-as-Code engine that enables you to implement governance rules that tightly protect your Stacks. Policies are easy to author using Open Policy Agent Rego syntax.

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Many different policy types are supported, allowing you to control all aspects of infrastructure access. Policies can also configure the Spacelift features available to individual users.

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Policy-as-Code with Spacelift makes it easy to secure your infrastructure workflows using programmatic rules and conditions. It reduces DevOps complexity by centralizing all governance controls in one platform, making them simpler to inspect and maintain. This supports a stable security and compliance posture.

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One platform for your whole team

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Spacelift serves as a single platform that your whole DevOps team can use. It provides a simple visual interface that enables easy access to IaC workflows and inspection of live infrastructure. This means developers don't need to learn complicated IaC terminal tools, while platform teams can precisely control everyone's access using policies.

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Collaborative multi-tenancy is deeply integrated into Spacelift. The Spaces feature offers first-class support for isolated environments that allow you to delegate access to different teams.

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Stacks, Policies, Cloud Integrations, and other components can all be assigned to different Spaces, enabling developers to be assigned the infrastructure they need while keeping production resources separate.

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Spacelift also supports self-service access workflows. Blueprints allow platform teams to create preconfigured Stack templates that developers can run in a few clicks. For example, you could provide a Blueprint that provisions an appropriately configured cloud database instance, ready for developers to use.

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This makes the DevOps loop more efficient as devs can reach for required resources on-demand.

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Integrated Terraform registry

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State management is a crucial part of IaC workflows. Whereas generic CI/CD pipelines are usually stateless, IaC is inherently stateful. Tools like Terraform and Pulumi need to track the state of your infrastructure between runs so they can accurately detect changes.

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It's often tricky to store and secure your state files at scale as this must be handled outside your CI/CD pipeline.

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Spacelift eliminates IaC state management complexity by including an integrated Terraform state backend. When enabled, Spacelift automatically stores and manages your Terraform state so you don't need to manually set up S3 buckets or custom HTTP servers.

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Spacelift also provides a built-in registry for your shared Terraform modules, letting you consolidate all your IaC assets within the platform.

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Automated infrastructure drift detection

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Managing drift poses headaches for DevOps teams using traditional CI/CD and IaC implementations. Failure to detect drift means infrastructure can persist in unexpected configurations, leading to reliability problems and possible compliance breaches.

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Spacelift simplifies drift management by including a built-in detection and resolution system. Drift detection runs can be scheduled to periodically execute against your Spacelift Stacks. Spacelift can then automatically trigger a reconciliation run if your live infrastructure differs from the config in your repository.

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Spacelift removes the overheads involved in manually finding and fixing drift. You can be more confident that your infrastructure is configured correctly, freeing up time to complete more impactful DevOps tasks.

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Drift normally becomes harder to fix the longer it persists in your infrastructure, so using Spacelift to deal with drift as it happens can significantly reduce the number of incidents you encounter.

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Should you use Spacelift for infrastructure management?

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Spacelift simplifies infrastructure management at scale. It implements an automation layer for your IaC tools, eliminating brittle CI/CD pipelines that are tricky to maintain at scale. Spacelift also provides a cohesive platform for collaborating on infrastructure and maintaining effective governance over your resources.

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We think that these benefits make Spacelift a compelling choice for DevOps and platform teams working with large IaC architectures. It drastically reduces operational complexity, making workflows simpler and more approachable.

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However, implementing Spacelift does take time as you need to learn the platform's unique concepts. Smaller teams where few people interact with infrastructure may find Spacelift is unnecessary, but it will make it easier to scale up in the future.

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Summary

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DevOps management is complex at scale. Teams frequently struggle with manual workflows, poor visibility into infrastructure, and missing governance controls. These problems cause development bottlenecks and make it more likely that misconfigurations will occur.

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Spacelift is an IaC orchestration platform that's purpose-built to solve these issues. We've seen that Spacelift makes DevOps simpler and more flexible by automating infrastructure management processes.

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But Spacelift also goes beyond simply running IaC workflows by also including a robust governance and observability layer. Developers and operators can collaborate using one platform that's secured using policy-as-code.

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At Semantive, we're Spacelift implementation experts. As a certified Spacelift partner, we're skilled in correctly configuring the platform for simplicity, efficiency, and maximum ROI. Book a free consultation to discover how Spacelift can simplify DevOps management for your team.

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