Managing infrastructure at scale is rarely a “set it and forget it” situation. As environments grow, the manual coordination of state files, pull requests, and cloud permissions starts to show its age. This is where specialized orchestrators like Spacelift come into the conversation—but it’s important to recognize that these tools are just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
The Foundation: You Still Need to Master the Code
Before even looking at an orchestration platform, it is important to remember that tools like Spacelift don’t write your infrastructure for you. Whether you use a specialized platform or a basic script, you still have to learn Terraform (HCL), Pulumi, or CloudFormation. If the underlying code is poorly structured or the logic is flawed, an orchestrator will simply help you deploy those mistakes more efficiently. Learning the nuances of state management, resource dependencies, and provider-specific quirks remains the most important part of the journey.
Specialized Orchestration vs. Generic CI/CD
There is a valid argument for sticking with generic tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins.
- The Case for Generic Tools: They are highly flexible and usually “free” (or already paid for). If your team is already using Jenkins to ship application code, adding a few Terraform stages keeps everything in one place. You don’t have to learn a new UI or manage another vendor relationship. For smaller projects or simple environments, specialized tools often introduce more overhead than they solve.
- The Case for Specialized Tools: Platforms like Spacelift are “IaC-aware.” They understand that a Terraform plan is different from a Java build. They offer built-in state locking and structured logging that generic tools lack without significant custom scripting.
Core Functionality and Use Cases
If you do decide to move toward a specialized layer, here are the primary features often discussed, along with how they work in practice:
1. Policy-as-Code (The “Guardrails”)
This allows you to write rules that check your code before it deploys. Using Open Policy Agent (OPA), you can prevent expensive or insecure resources from being created.
- Use Case: A policy that automatically blocks any database instance that isn’t configured for high availability in a production environment.
2. Drift Detection
Cloud environments change. Sometimes someone makes a “quick fix” in the AWS or Azure console, bypassing Git.
- Use Case: The system periodically checks the actual cloud state against your code. If they don’t match, it alerts the team so the code can be updated or the manual change can be reverted.
3. Stack Dependencies
Complex environments often require a specific order of operations.
- Use Case: Ensuring that the “Network Stack” (VPC, peering, subnets) is fully deployed and healthy before the “Application Stack” (EKS or RDS) even begins to plan.
Hands-on: What the Logic Looks Like
To use the governance features, you have to learn Rego, a logic language. It’s powerful, but it’s another layer of complexity to manage. Here is what those “guardrails” look like in practice:
Example 1: The “Blast Radius” Warning
This policy doesn’t stop a deployment, but it forces a manual review if more than 10 resources are being deleted.
Code snippet
package spacelift
# Warn if more than 10 resources are being deleted
warn[msg] {
num_delete := count([res | res := input.terraform.resource_changes[_];
res.change.actions[_] == "delete"])
num_delete > 10
msg := sprintf("Large Blast Radius: You are deleting %d resources. Review required.", [num_delete])
}
Example 2: The Budget Gatekeeper
This strictly denies the deployment if an expensive instance type is used.
Code snippet
package spacelift
# Deny expensive DB instances
deny[msg] {
res := input.terraform.resource_changes[_]
res.type == "aws_db_instance"
res.change.after.instance_class == "db.m5.16xlarge"
msg := "Deployment Denied: Instance class exceeds budget limits."
}
Comparison of Approaches
| Feature | Spacelift | Terraform Cloud | GitHub Actions / Jenkins |
| Philosophy | Tool-agnostic orchestrator. | The “Official” Terraform path. | General-purpose automation. |
| Tool Support | Multi-tool (TF, Pulumi, K8s). | Primarily Terraform. | Anything you can script. |
| State Management | Included. | Included. | You manage (S3, GCS, etc.). |
| Governance | OPA (Rego). | Sentinel (Proprietary). | Custom scripts/Third-party. |
The Trade-offs: The Good, The Bad, and The Neutral
The Upsides:
- Visibility: It’s much easier to see what a “Plan” is doing in a structured UI than scrolling through thousands of lines of raw text in a Jenkins log.
- Security (OIDC): You can use short-lived credentials via OpenID Connect, so you aren’t storing long-lived AWS secret keys in your CI/CD settings.
- Agnosticism: It works the same way whether you are using Terraform today or Pulumi tomorrow.
The Downsides:
- Complexity: Learning Rego for policies is a significant hurdle. It is a niche language with a steep learning curve.
- Cost: While there are free tiers, enterprise features come with a price tag that might not be justifiable for teams with straightforward infrastructure.
- The “Monolith” Risk: It encourages breaking infra into small “Stacks.” If your current setup is one giant file, the migration process can be painful.
Quick-Fire FAQ: Real Talk
Q: Is it worth the switch from a basic Jenkins pipeline?
A: It depends. If you are struggling with state locks, manual drift, or developers accidentally nuking resources, then yes. If your current pipeline works and your team is small, the extra complexity might not be worth it yet.
Q: Does this mean I can skip learning the deep technical parts of Terraform?
A: Absolutely not. If anything, you need to know Terraform better to take advantage of things like stack dependencies and structured outputs.
Q: What is the biggest “gotcha”?
A: Credential management. Even with a tool like this, you still need a solid identity strategy (like OIDC) to ensure your cloud is actually secure.
Final Considerations
Choosing an infrastructure management strategy isn’t about finding the “best” tool; it’s about finding the one that fits your team’s current skill set and future scale. Whether you stay with a generic CI/CD tool or move to a specialized platform like Spacelift, the goal remains the same: stable, predictable, and secure deployments.