The Advantages of Spacelift for Modern Infrastructure Orchestration
As cloud environments grow more complex - spanning AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, on-prem, and hybrid - teams increasingly realize that Terraform alone isn’t an orchestration strategy. You can write Infrastructure-as-Code, but without a platform to safely execute, govern, test, and automate it, you can’t operate IaC at scale.
That’s where Spacelift has emerged as the orchestration platform of choice: a flexible, policy-driven control plane for platform engineering teams who need more than CI/CD pipelines, and more than “just Terraform runs.”
At Absolute Ops, many of our customers standardize on Spacelift because it brings speed, safety, compliance, visibility, and operational consistency - without locking teams into one cloud, one workflow, or one IaC tool.
1. Spacelift Treats IaC Like Production-Grade Software
Traditional CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins) were built to compile and deploy application code - not operate infrastructure.
Spacelift delivers the missing orchestration layer:
- Full infrastructure run lifecycle
- Smart plan/apply pipelines
- Workspace variables & environment controls
- Automatic drift detection
- Stack dependency graphing
- Approval and verification workflows
Infrastructure becomes repeatable, testable, and governed - just like production software.
2. Multi-Cloud Orchestration Without Complexity
Spacelift supports:
- Terraform
- OpenTofu
- Pulumi
- CloudFormation
- Terragrunt
- Kubernetes manifests
- Custom runners and workflows
This makes it possible to use one orchestration engine for:
- AWS landing zones
- Azure networking & identity
- GCP project provisioning
- Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE, on-prem clusters)
- Hybrid cloud builds
- Proxmox or VMware automation
Instead of 20 scripts and a dozen CI pipelines, Spacelift becomes your central control plane.
3. Governance and Guardrails Built In
Spacelift’s policy-as-code using OPA (Open Policy Agent) ensures the rules of your platform are applied consistently and automatically.
Examples of guardrails:
- No public S3 buckets
- Only approved instance types allowed
- IAM permission changes require approval
- Production applies require two reviewers
- DR workflows only run from approved identities
Governance moves from documentation to code - without slowing teams down.
4. Safe, Controlled Self-Service Infrastructure
Platform engineering teams want to empower developers… without handing them AWS keys.
Spacelift makes this possible:
- Parameterized, reusable stacks
- Role-based access control (RBAC)
- Policy-enforced workflows
- “Apply without credentials” execution
- Previews, branch-based environments, and promotion pipelines
Developers get autonomy.
Platform teams keep control.
Everybody wins.
5. Superior Observability, Auditability, and Drift Control
With Spacelift, every change is:
- Logged
- Versioned
- Diffed
- Audited
- Visualized
And drift detection continuously checks for out-of-band changes - something CI systems simply don't do well.
This gives engineering, security, and compliance teams a shared, trustworthy source of truth.
6. Collaboration Designed for Modern Platform Engineering
Spacelift supports workflows that distributed teams rely on:
- Ephemeral preview environments
- Branch-based planning
- Resource tracking
- Promotion from dev → stage → prod
- Shared policies
- Testable changes
It becomes a collaborative platform instead of a pipeline spaghetti bowl.
7. An Extensible Platform That Adapts to Your Architecture
Spacelift is powerful out-of-the-box but also highly extensible:
- Private worker pools
- On-prem and hybrid support
- Custom runtimes
- Enterprise SSO and audit logging
- Secure connectivity for isolated networks
- Freedom to choose your IaC tool & version
This flexibility makes it easy to adopt in complex enterprise environments - and in PE portfolios with many tech stacks.
Final Thoughts: Spacelift Is the Missing Orchestration Layer
Spacelift is not a Terraform wrapper and not a CI/CD substitute.
It is the orchestration, governance, and automation layer that modern cloud environments require.
With:
- Multi-IaC support
- Policy-as-code
- Secure self-service
- Drift detection
- Enterprise governance
- Cross-cloud workflows
- Auditability and visibility
- Built-in collaboration
…it becomes the foundation for reliable, compliant, high-velocity infrastructure operations.
