Is your platform team struggling to keep pace with the AI-accelerated rate of development?
In this edition of Mission Infrastructure, we bring you the 2026 Infrastructure Automation Report — the first research-backed overview of the impact of AI on infrastructure automation. Find out where you rank among your peers and learn how to leverage the benefits of AI without putting your infrastructure at risk.
We also bring you our most popular recent articles and videos and fill you in on a couple of virtual events well worth your time.
The 2026 Infrastructure Automation Report
Based on a survey of 406 leaders and practitioners, the 2026 Infrastructure Automation Report breaks down what AI is doing to infrastructure teams right now and how the most prepared teams leverage the benefits of AI while minimizing the risks.
Download the report to:
See what separates the best equipped teams from the least prepared
Identify where AI is quietly exposing your infrastructure to risk
Learn the five moves to close the gap before agents go live in your infrastructure
And register for The AI Readiness Gap: Where Infrastructure Teams are Getting AI Wrong on July 16 to get a live walkthrough of the report with AHEAD Platform Engineering Principal Faizal Afzal and Spacelift CMO Dimitri Vlachos.
New Articles — Top Picks
How to Build Enterprise Cloud Governance That Scales
Governance systems enable you to keep your cloud resources secure, efficient, and correctly configured at all times, but they are easily stressed as you scale. In this article, James Walker explains why cloud governance matters, highlights common issues, and outlines practical strategies and best practices for building scalable, enterprise-ready cloud governance frameworks.
What Is Cloud Misconfiguration & How Do You Prevent It?
Cloud misconfiguration describes any cloud setting, permission, or deployment choice that deviates from security best practices or least privilege, such as public storage buckets, open inbound ports, or overly permissive IAM roles. It is regularly cited as one of the top causes of data breaches, but it is entirely preventable. David Galiata’s article walks through what cloud misconfiguration actually is, why it keeps happening, what it costs, and how to avoid it.
Platform engineering involves building and maintaining internal platforms that enable developers to stay productive by automating complex DevOps workflows. However, platforms often fail because they don’t align with how developers work or because they are not scalable or user-friendly. James Walker’s article outlines 15 platform engineering best practices for building a platform and discusses concerns such as cost, reliability, and shared responsibility.
Multicloud Challenges: 9 Key Issues & Best Practices
Multicloud involves using multiple cloud providers within a single IT architecture. The model increases operational flexibility, resiliency, and redundancy, but it also adds complexity for developers and infrastructure teams. In this article, James Walker discusses nine common problems with multicloud operations, explains why they happen, and shares strategies for resolving them.
Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) enable developers to engage with complex DevOps processes by allowing the safe exposure of infrastructure provisioning and configuration tasks, without providing direct access to the underlying cloud accounts. However, building one involves large-scale investment. The Spacelift infrastructure orchestration platform is an alternative solution. In this article, James Walker compares Spacelift with custom IDPs.
IaCConf Spotlight: Designing IaC Interfaces that Work for Humans, AI Agents, and Whatever Comes Next
July 14, 2026
12PM EDT/9AM PDT
Virtual
Few Terraform modules are designed to be consumed well. However, after Jinger Meilani, Sr DevOps Engineer at MNTN, applied interface design principles from A Philosophy of Software Design to modules used by non-infrastructure developers, misuse declined, onboarding accelerated, and direct Slack pings fell. In this IaCConf Spotlight, Jinger demonstrates concrete interface design patterns that reduce misuse regardless of who or what is calling your code.
The AI Readiness Gap: Where Infrastructure Teams are Getting AI Wrong
July 16 2026
1PM EDT/10AM PDT
Virtual
The 2026 State of Infrastructure Automation report surveys 406 infrastructure teams to reveal the reality of AI readiness and platform maturity. Join CNCF and platform engineering ambassador and principal at AHEAD, Faisal Afzal, and Spacelift CMO Dimitri Vlachos, as they walk through the findings live on July 16, including the gap between what teams say and what their workflows show.
Managing Terraform at scale raises issues such as slow plans, insecure deployments, state files bloated with hundreds of resources, and a platform team that can't keep up with demand. In this video, we walk through the most common Terraform scaling problems and how Spacelift resolves them by splitting state with stack dependencies, enforcing security with policy as code, detecting and reconciling drift automatically, and giving developers a self-service path that doesn't sacrifice control.
Marking a Terraform variable as sensitive might conceal it from terminal output, but it doesn't remove it from state files, plan files, or logs. It’s usually too late when most teams realize this.
In this video, we break down what sensitive = true actually does in Terraform, the gaps it leaves where secrets can still leak, and the safer patterns you should follow: proper secrets managers, short-lived credentials, remote state with encryption, and controlled CI/CD access.
OpenTofu Tutorial: Getting Started with the Core Workflow
Infrastructure teams are adopting OpenTofu as the open-source alternative to Terraform, but how do you use it? In this video, we walk through the core OpenTofu workflow from scratch: installing the CLI, initializing a project, validating configuration, planning a change, applying it, and cleaning up. With no need for cloud credentials, you’ll get a clear picture of how the tool actually works.
