An Intellyx Brain Candy Update
Since we last covered Spacelift in November 2024, the company has reworked its stack-independent infrastructure orchestration platform for platform engineers into an AI-native infrastructure orchestration platform that both supports Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) as well as abstracting the IaC entirely.
As a result, platform engineers can now leverage AI to move as fast as the development teams that are all leveraging AI themselves.
For platform engineering teams that are invested in the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) for their IaC workflows, Spacelift provides an LLM-based chat interface that enables engineers to express their intent for infrastructure configuration, as well as to query Spacelift-configured infrastructure via natural language prompts.
Spacelift’s more disruptive capability, however, is how it can leverage AI to abstract the IaC, replacing the need for HCL configurations entirely. Instead of representing such configurations via the earlier-generation coding paradigm, Spacelift represents infrastructure configurations as context.
Such context represents configuration metadata, policies, and the intent of engineers when they prompt the platform – a pattern that we’re now calling AI-native.
Intellyx hot take: representing infrastructure configuration as code has always suffered from the limitations of the code itself: the need to manage, test, and update it following traditional coding practices. By abstracting infrastructure as context, Spacelift addresses these limitations.
Intellyx cold take: By essentially obsoleting HCL and by extension IaC generally, Spacelift runs afoul of the Innovator’s Dilemma: how do they continue to support customers who don’t want to give up IaC? The company’s dual-pronged approach is a temporary measure to assuage those customers while the market moves past IaC entirely.
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