Spacelift

My main use case for Spacelift is to automate and provision infrastructure as code, specifically by integrating our IaC Terraform with Spacelift.

A quick, specific example of how I use Spacelift with Terraform in my setup is that we write Terraform templates and integrate our Terraform code with Spacelift, using Spacelift to provision the infrastructure as a CI/CD tool, which helps us detect drift and assists with remediation.

I have more to add about my main use case with Spacelift, mainly on drift detection, as we are handling around 900 to 1,000 servers for Linux, so we use Terraform templates with Spacelift to manage our large-scale infrastructure operations.

The best features Spacelift offers include drift detection, multi-IaC support, and an open policy as code with Open Policy Agent.

The major impact that Spacelift has had on our organization is mainly related to detecting drift, especially as we maintain around a thousand servers. Additionally, Spacelift facilitates faster infrastructure delivery, allowing us to deploy our infrastructure with one click. Governance and compliance have improved, significantly reducing the majority of our security risks and enhancing the security of our current server strategies.

I mention the need for improvement of Spacelift.

I specifically wish to see improvements in Spacelift's user interface, making it more useful and easier for the team to understand. Additionally, enhancing the remediation capabilities on a broader scale would benefit our teams.

Another improvement I suggest is enhancing the templates for Terraform that can be integrated with Spacelift, allowing Spacelift to maintain default templates for these IaCs. If the team could integrate AI-assisted infrastructure operations, that would also be helpful.

I have been using Spacelift for around eight months, which is between eight to one year.

Spacelift is stable.

Spacelift can handle increased workloads well, managing more servers as our organization grows, and it is indeed scalable.

The customer support experience involves sending an email, but I have never requested customer support so far to resolve any issues.

I did not previously use a different solution.

My experience with pricing shows that the setup cost is reasonable, and the licensing also seems reasonable. The setup takes very little time since it integrates with our SVN or source code repository, and then we are good to go.

We have seen a return on investment, as the time saved for our DevOps team is significant. In terms of costs, identifying drift detection helps us remove unused servers, benefitting our application management.

My experience with pricing shows that the setup cost is reasonable, and the licensing also seems reasonable.

We have not evaluated any other options before choosing Spacelift.

After using Spacelift, I noticed a 90% reduction in time saved for repetitive infrastructure tasks, as the cloud configuration speed has doubled. For instance, if we previously deployed a server in ten minutes, we now do it in three to four minutes, along with increased deployment frequency for both Kubernetes and cloud deployments, greatly enhancing our metrics.

I have mentioned the improvements needed for Spacelift.

My advice for others looking into using Spacelift is that if there is a possibility of exploring more tools, they can consider alternatives, but from our experience, we are satisfied with what we are currently using. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

I used Spacelift for one project with a duration of around six months.

Spacelift was used mainly for automating client infrastructure using Terraform and applying OPA policies to automate Terraform as an integrating tool that controls the whole infrastructure-as-code part.

In the project, we used a single GitHub repository for storing the infrastructure code and Terraform for the infrastructure-as-code. Terraform commands such as plan and apply were automated using Spacelift, which was integrated with OPA policies to check authorization, authentication, and whether the developer had permission to perform actions such as creating a virtual machine in the correct region. All this process was monitored using Spacelift.

We also integrated monitoring tools such as Grafana and Prometheus with Spacelift, but it was not completed unfortunately because the project duration ended. In summary, we used Spacelift for automating the infrastructure side and for role-based access control level user access to clients and applying the policies that they need in the organization.

Spacelift impacted our organization positively in several areas. Time-saving was achieved by eliminating the need for coordination runs. Before Spacelift, engineers had to coordinate via Slack to ensure no conflicting Terraform applies were running, saving each engineer roughly 30 to 45 minutes per deployment cycle just in coordination overhead.

Error reduction was another clear benefit, as the mandatory plan review step before any apply and OPA policies blocking non-compliant changes meant that a whole category of human errors simply could not happen. For team collaboration, Spacelift was transformative, allowing the whole team to safely propose, review, and apply changes, improving knowledge sharing across the team.

Before Spacelift, we averaged around two to three infrastructure-related incidents per month, such as state conflicts or unreviewed manual changes causing unexpected behavior. After adopting Spacelift, that dropped to roughly one every six to eight weeks, representing a 60 to 70% reduction in incidents. On time savings, our team of four engineers was collectively spending around six to eight hours per week on deployment coordination and managing run order manually, which came down to roughly two hours per week after Spacelift, freeing up meaningful time for actual feature work and improvements.

One thing that stood out unexpectedly was how well Spacelift handles drift detection in Terraform workflows, catching discrepancies early, which saved us significant troubleshooting time. The best features in my opinion are policies-as-code using OPA policies, stack dependencies, and Git-driven workflows. Overall, Spacelift bridges the gap between raw Terraform and enterprise-grade infrastructure management in a way that tools such as Jenkins or Cloud Build could not match natively.

One specific situation where drift detection really saved us was when a team member manually adjusted a security group rule directly in the AWS console during an incident, intending to revert it later but never did. Without Spacelift's drift detection, it would have silently remained out of sync with our Terraform state indefinitely. Spacelift flagged it within the next scheduled detection cycle, allowing us to review and reconcile the state before it caused compliance issues.

On stack dependencies, we had a layered setup where our networking stack had to be fully applied before the compute stack, and the compute stack before the application stack. Previously, we managed this manually, but with Spacelift's stack dependencies, we defined those relationships once, and it handled the trigger chain automatically, preventing partial deployment failures we used to deal with regularly.

The UI is one of Spacelift's stronger points, as the run view is clean and gives a clear timeline of what happened at each stage with easy-to-navigate logs. For team members who were not deeply technical on the Terraform side, the interface was approachable. The GitHub integration was seamless, as pull request comments with plan output worked out of the box, making code reviews much more collaborative. We also integrated it with Slack for notifications, so the team got alerts on failed runs or drift detection events without having to actively monitor the dashboard. That kind of passive visibility is underrated; it keeps everyone aware without adding overhead, and the integration ecosystem felt mature, not something bolted on as an afterthought.

Spacelift's documentation is quite thorough compared to some other tools in this space, with well-explained concepts and practical examples that cover edge cases. The documentation had enough working examples for us to adapt OPA policies without needing to dig through community forums or raise support tickets. The API support is also solid, exposing a GraphQL API that gives a lot of flexibility for automation, along with a Terraform provider for managing Spacelift itself as code, allowing version control of configurations such as stacks, policies, and contexts.

There are a few areas where there is room for improvement, particularly the initial setup and onboarding experience, which has a learning curve around understanding the concept of contexts. Better onboarding wizards would help new users get productive faster. The OPA policy writing is not very beginner-friendly either, and the error messages when a policy fails are not always clear. Pricing transparency is another area that could improve, as smaller teams or startups would benefit from clear tier breakdowns rather than having to go through a sales conversation.

I have been working in my current field for around three years.

My main advice would be to start with a clear understanding of your Terraform structure before onboarding Spacelift, as it works best when the infrastructure is reasonably modular. Spacelift fills a real gap in the infrastructure-as-code tooling landscape, providing a layer of workflow management that Terraform alone does not scale well without. For any team that has grown beyond a single engineer running Terraform locally, it is worth evaluating seriously, as the investment in setup pays off quickly in reduced incidents and improved confidence around infrastructure changes. I would rate this product an 8.

My main use case for Spacelift is for configuration management, and I used it for automation using Ansible playbooks.

A quick specific example of how I used Spacelift for configuration management and automation with Ansible playbooks is that we previously used Ansible for Linux-based tasks such as the creation of users, patching of the servers, and installation of agents. If a server is built new, we need to install multiple tools and security tools, and for the installation of those agents on the endpoint servers, we used Spacelift.

Regarding my use case with Spacelift, one more use case I have used is that we previously saved the Ansible playbook scripts locally or in a shared drive, then we used a GitLab repo which was integrated with Spacelift. This was helpful for us to manage the codes through GitLab repos and integrating that with Spacelift.

Spacelift offers compatibility with multiple clouds, which I have seen used for the implementation.

I have used Spacelift with AWS and Oracle Cloud, and that flexibility helped my team.

Regarding features, we integrated Spacelift with the GitLab repo, which is one important integration, and along with that, you can use webhooks. I have not used it much because my scope was very small, but I have seen in the Spacelift GUI that many capabilities, such as using it as a CI/CD pipeline, exist.

Spacelift has positively impacted my organization by reducing manpower, as it reduced the efforts of resources in the team, where previously a job done by two or three engineers can now be easily managed by one engineer using Spacelift.

Regarding how Spacelift can be improved, I do not have much idea since my scope of usage was very minimal. I do not have much to add about needed improvements or anything I found confusing.

I have used Spacelift for a period of six to twelve months.

About measuring that impact, I have seen a basic observation, but I do not remember the real calculations done as I have used this around two or three years back. The calculations were done and given by the management, not by me.

I chose a rating of six out of ten because I think multiple other tools similar to Spacelift exist, for example, many automation tools such as Jenkins or other cloud-native tools that perform efficiently compared to Spacelift.

My advice to others looking into using Spacelift is that it would be a good, user-friendly tool. If you are more aware of the concepts from the basics, you will understand it better. If you directly use Spacelift through the graphic user interface without that knowledge, you might not get the basics, for example, regarding Ansible.

Spacelift is an easy to use tool that makes life easy by not burdening you with configuring a configuration management tool, as it comes ready-made.

My main use case for Spacelift is that I primarily use it for Terraform, focusing on module versioning and deployment. Recently, we started exploring the blueprints option, but the primary focus remains on getting my Terraform landing zones defined and versioned in Spacelift and then testing the modules increment. As we have a GitOps approach, we want every commit and every pull request in Git to run through the set of tests that we have defined in the module in Spacelift. In summary, it serves as the main infrastructure as code tool.

A specific example of how I use Spacelift in my workflow is that we have landing zones in Azure based on the Microsoft concept of landing zones, where we define what we have in an application landing zone or a management landing zone and so on. These landing zones are built using Terraform modules, and each of those modules I have defined in Spacelift. Spacelift is tied to our Git repo, and that's where we develop the modules. For example, we have a SQL module where we have a SQL database module, SQL server module, and so on. They have versioning, and they're all tied together. If we want to deploy that specific SQL as part of a landing zone because an application needs it, we go to the application zone and plug in that module, referencing it from Spacelift. Then we deploy it, and especially if we want to release new features or new versions, we can simply increment the module version and go to the landing zone and do a small increment of the version of the module, which will deploy the new features. This represents approximately 90% of my use cases.

My use case for Spacelift fits into my workflow in many aspects through useful features such as the environments that you can pass between modules, which is not something that comes native in Terraform. Spacelift helps when I have variables that I want to pass between modules, between landing zones in our case, which are the stacks in Spacelift. When I say landing zone, that equals a stack, a Spacelift stack. It's valuable that I can pass the variables between stacks when I have some references, which isn't easily achievable with Terraform. Building the stack dependencies is another feature I use. It is excellent because I can execute stack updates based on module changes, then run that in a dependency flow and execute the change on each stack as I do it, so that I don't forget or miss any of that if I would have been doing this manually. I mentioned earlier that I started exploring the blueprints as well, but I still don't have a strong use case yet for that one in my team at least.

The best features Spacelift offers for my team include module versioning and testing. Whenever I want to touch on a module, add new functionality, change something, or do bug fixes, I do it directly in my Git or in my code editor. As I push the code, I can see direct feedback from Spacelift on whether the changes I've made are passing or breaking something. That's one of the best features for me. Then there's drift detection, which is really powerful because I can set a certain schedule for drift detection, and it lets me know if someone touches anything in the Azure console, for example, and it's not reflected in my Terraform. The policies are quite nice as well because they use the Snowbell standard for doing the policy as code, and I can set certain permissions for which team can work with which part of my stacks. The centralized workflow for infrastructure as code goes without saying.

Spacelift has positively impacted my organization in significant ways in terms of building infrastructure as code. There are other tools as well, but if I would run Terraform without any orchestrator such as Spacelift, it tends to be very tedious. It is positive in that it speeds up development with the automated tests that I mentioned earlier, giving me confidence that I don't normally have if I would be developing locally without such a tool as Spacelift. It also gives confidence to the people who are doing PR reviews, so when an engineer in my team creates something, changes something, or adds or removes from an existing module or stack, the PR review gives confidence that there are no breaking changes being applied through it. It speeds up the development and also speeds up deployment. Going back from a disaster recovery solution where I had to use it a couple of times, when everything is set, it's fairly quick to have full infrastructure back and operational in a matter of 20 to 30 minutes, as opposed to not using such tools. It has definitely affected speed of delivery, cost of delivery, and collaboration between teams or with other teams where we can provide rights to Spacelift, allowing for more gradual rights.

Regarding improvements needed in Spacelift, it's difficult to say because I have been using it for a while now and haven't seen many areas where I would want to see something new because much of what I missed at the beginning has actually been added. The engineering team behind Spacelift is very responsive whenever I submit a feature request, and there's a very good chance I would see it within the next year, which has been the case a couple of times for me. Perhaps the learning curve could be a bit steep if someone is completely new to Spacelift and only has experience with plain Terraform. Apart from that, perhaps some cost visibility of the infrastructure would be interesting to have, unless it's already there and I haven't seen it.

I would add about the needed improvements that a reporting solution where I could click through my stacks and see the costs driving my stack, such as whether it's the database, the sizing, or the VM types being used, could be an interesting feature to have.

I have used Spacelift for about three years.

Spacelift is stable.

Spacelift's scalability is very good as it scales very well with the environment because I can add agents to it with more workload, so it's quite excellent.

The customer support is fantastic as they reply over Slack immediately and get to work on a solution whenever I need them. It's one of the best customer supports I have seen from a company.

I haven't switched from any other solution, though I have used Terraform Enterprise in a separate project.

I have definitely seen a return on investment since time saved equals money saved as well.

I don't have much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing as that's handled by a different team. With pricing and setup costs, I don't have anything to compare it with regarding other tools, so I can't provide much information around the pricing.

Before choosing Spacelift, I evaluated only Terraform Enterprise as an option.

My experience with the drift detection feature is that we rely on it more than I would prefer. It's not ideal to detect drifts in my code, but every now and then somebody can make a change in a console to test something quickly or fix something quickly, and then they can forget to apply that change in the code if it should be there on a permanent basis. Drift detection will be there to tell me that something is off and I need to have a look, so if it's something related to permissions that I change and forget about permissions for a certain resource, it comes in very handy there as well.

I don't think there are any improvements needed in Spacelift that we haven't discussed, and I believe that covers everything.

I would advise others looking into using Spacelift to evaluate and make sure it's the right tool for what they're planning to do, but I would definitely recommend it very highly. I gave this review a rating of 9.

I used Spacelift for a proof of concept for a project approximately two years ago. Since Spacelift is a CI/CD tool for Terraform code, we have used it as a CI/CD tool for our Terraform Infrastructure as Code files. Whenever we need to build or make any changes on the servers, we use Spacelift and simply by making those changes manually on a configuration file in VS Code, as soon as we push the code to GitHub, it runs the code directly on Terraform without any manual intervention. This is the main use case for us.

We needed to automate our Terraform code so that we could simply write those code files in VS Code, and that code could be pushed from Git and GitHub so that it could directly configure the servers and make the changes on our cloud. That's how we started to use Terraform with Spacelift because earlier we were using all those things manually. We were simply writing those code and then running those Terraform plan and apply commands, and Spacelift does all these things for us. This is the main help from Spacelift.

Spacelift has other features beyond Terraform, including Ansible, Pulumi, Terragrunt, and it also helps with Kubernetes, although we haven't used it for the other tools. We have only used it for Terraform Infrastructure as Code, and it has helped us significantly. One standout feature compared to Terraform Cloud is the ability to apply policies. For example, we want to restrict engineers in our team from building servers with a particular SKU, such as in Azure, where we do not want to run servers with a SKU higher than the standard D4sv5. We can apply those policies in Spacelift, and the RBAC and access policies features are really excellent in Spacelift, which we do not find in any of the other competitor tools. The pricing is also competitive compared to Terraform Cloud.

The access policy features allow us to assign specific policies since we have three environments in our company: Dev, QA, and Prod. We assign policies so that anyone can run code from Dev and QA servers, but we assign a policy for specific people, such as managers, to run code in Prod. This is a very good feature from Spacelift that we have implemented for the access policy.

Spacelift has positively impacted our organization as a CI/CD tool for application deployment and development. Although we use other CI/CD tools like Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, there wasn't a specific tool for Terraform Infrastructure as Code until Spacelift came along. It allows us to easily configure our servers and build a number of them on our cloud. While other CI/CD tools have started to include configuration features, Spacelift offers many other benefits that make it an excellent tool to use.

I would say that I think there are still some changes or improvements required on this tool. Pricing could be a little lower to make it a very robust tool, and it can improve areas in scalability and integrate some open-source tools. If there are no limitations on Spacelift, that would be ideal.

I have been working in my current field for more than ten years.

Spacelift is stable; we haven't found any bugs or errors, making it a very good tool to use.

The customer support is very good. The team at Spacelift is very helpful, and they possess ample knowledge. I have asked them various queries, and they provided perfect solutions along with good detailed documentation.

Previously, we used Terraform Cloud since it was free. However, when Terraform Cloud began to incur costs, Spacelift became our first choice. We switched because Terraform Cloud lacked good policies, such as access policies, and didn't provide much functionality. In contrast, Spacelift has excellent access policies that we can assign to different users, helping us significantly. I evaluated Terraform Cloud.

We have saved a lot of time since we started using Spacelift. There is no longer any manual integration or deployment on the servers. We are just pushing code from Git to GitHub, which then sends it to Spacelift, checking for drifts and starting continuous deployment. This is how we have saved time; earlier tasks that required two or three people now only need one resource to complete.

Spacelift is a paid tool; it's a GUI tool that we purchase directly from the Spacelift application. We cannot install or configure it on-premises or on any of our servers. During the proof of concept phase, I used the free version, which was available for a fourteen-day trial for two users. The next standard plan costs three hundred ninety-nine dollars per month for ten concurrent users. So, three hundred ninety-nine dollars per month is the cost for it. Compared to Terraform Cloud, this is slightly lower for approximately fifteen users. If your team comprises around fifteen to twenty members, everyone should use Spacelift; that covers all the costs.

The workflow has changed significantly. Earlier we were writing those Terraform files in VS Code and then running that command—Terraform plan, Terraform apply, and then Terraform destroy. However, as soon as we started to use Spacelift and simply push the code to GitHub, it provides us a GUI in the stack form, giving us detailed output. For instance, when the Terraform plan runs automatically, it asks before applying to confirm or discard. This is the main use case for us.

The GUI provided by Spacelift is very effective, giving us many features without the constant black screens that make finding errors difficult. It is easy for us to discover errors or blockers through this GUI. It also aids us in running commands which we normally execute from the terminal; now we can easily do it from the GUI as well. When we click on a task, we can run small commands and obtain the output. This functionality has significantly reduced our need for iterations to execute commands manually and wait for their results. As soon as we make a change in our code file and push it to GitHub, it automatically runs the plan and asks for our approval; upon giving approval, it makes the changes on the servers.

If you're looking to automate your Infrastructure as Code, then Spacelift is the best choice. Use Spacelift, and you'll notice the differences, whether you haven't used Terraform Cloud or if you have used it; you will find many great features in Spacelift that make it an excellent tool for Infrastructure as Code. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.