Welcome to the latest edition of Mission Infrastructure, your monthly tour of the infrastructure-as-code world. In this issue, we explore the upheaval with HCP Terraform’s free tier and guide you on how to get buy-in from your team if you decide to explore alternatives, open-source or otherwise.
We also bring you recent videos that provide a head-to-head comparison of Atlantis vs. Spacelift and illuminate the process of automating Terraform with GitHub Actions (and why teams opt for more scalable alternatives). Plus we’ll give you the inside story on our latest product updates.
If you’re confused by the Terraform Cloud free tier story, you’re not alone. With headlines proclaiming that “free” is no more, emails referencing plan changes, and the product name now appearing as HCP Terraform, many teams are wondering whether they should continue to bind their Terraform automation to a platform whose definition of “free” can change without warning.
Read Mariusz Michalowski’s article to get the full details of all the changes, including key dates, important January 2026 updates, and exit options if you’d rather leave Terraform Cloud behind.
Do you have your own questions on switching from TFC to Spacelift?
Wondering how to manage your infrastructure if you move away from HCP Terraform? Open-source automation tools are a key element of modern DevOps and infrastructure practices because they give teams greater freedom around standardizing processes and eliminating repetitive work, without slowing down or sacrificing reliability. Read Mariusz Michalowski’s article to learn how open-source automation tools strengthen DevOps collaboration and why the communities built around them are so valuable for building resilient and secure platforms.
If you decide to alter course and adopt an alternative to HCP Terraform to manage your infrastructure, you may get pushback from your developers. They may be unsure about how to use the new tools or even why they’re required. And if they have no input in the decision-making process, they may be even more resistant. In this article, James Walker shares ten best practices for winning buy-in from your team.
Kubernetes rolling updates incrementally replace old Pods with new ones, enabling you to avoid downtime when deploying new versions of your applications. In this guide, James Walker explains their benefits and how they work, provides detailed examples of their use, and compares them with other popular deployment strategies.
Infrastructure as code (IaC) helps ensure AI agents run consistently, securely, and scalably across environments. In this article, Ioannis Moustakis outlines the key principles for agentic AI deployments, explains Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, delivers a step-by-step guide to deploying an agent with IaC on AWS with Terraform, and offers guidelines for working with AgentCore.
Terraform with GitHub Actions is a good place to start with automation, but it gets tricky as you scale. In this video, we walk through a complete Terraform workflow and then cover the issues that typically arise as more people and environments get involved. We also talk about drift and what to build if you want detection and safe remediation. Finally, we show how dedicated Terraform automation platforms like Spacelift address scaling issues with built-in state handling and locking, dynamic cloud credentials, policy-as-code guardrails, drift monitoring, and cleaner multi-environment orchestration.
Terraform deployments are deceptively easy to manage when you start, but problems arise when you start to scale them without guardrails. In this video, we compare Atlantis and Spacelift so you can decide which option fits your team’s size, risk profile, and governance needs. By the end, you’ll have a clear decision framework for when a lightweight, self-hosted PR-centric workflow is enough, and when a dedicated IaC control plane is the safer choice.
“Infrastructure rarely breaks because of bad tools, it breaks because of untested assumptions. Subscribe to learn my hard-won lessons from scaling systems at Facebook and Google, the highs and lows of co-founding OpenTofu and Spacelift, and everything in between.”
Marcin Wyszynski, Co-founder @ Spacelift & OpenTofu
Spacelift Plugins are a powerful new way to extend your infrastructure workflows by seamlessly integrating your team’s trusted tools. Integrating directly into your Spacelift workflows, Plugins allow you to:
Augment runs with security scanning, cost estimation, compliance checks, and more
Standardize tooling across your organization without forcing teams into rigid processes
Build custom integrations that fit your unique requirements
Leverage community contributions to accelerate your infrastructure operations
Previously, if you wanted to share a module with a space, you needed the following permissions:
Admin access on the space where the module belongs, AND
Write access on the space where the module belongs
We have now introduced a new action to advanced access: The SPACE_SHARE_MODULE control enables sharing a module with a space without giving admin or write access to the target space. Note that the role should be assigned to the space you want to share with — not the space of the module itself.
You can read more about module registry permissions in the documentation here.
Get Started with Spacelift
Ready to start your journey to IaC orchestration? Schedule a demo or explore yourself with a Spacelift free trial.
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