Welcome to the October edition of Mission Infrastructure, your monthly tour of the infrastructure-as-code world. In this issue, we bring you Spacelift Intent, a new deployment model that uses AI to bring natural language to infrastructure provisioning. We also share some of the best recent articles from the Spacelift blog — as well as an interesting migration story from the OpenTofu blog — report on some unmissable upcoming events, and fill you in on our product updates.
Spacelift Intent takes any natural language request and calls providers directly using their API — giving you real infrastructure, real state, and real management without a single line of HCL. Read Marcin Wyszynski’s article to discover more about Spacelift Intent.
The benefits of DevOps are compelling, but development and operations teams often struggle to transition to DevOps-based workflows. Challenges ranging from culture conflicts to incomplete governance controls mean implementations don’t always deliver desired outcomes. In this article, James Walker explores 12 of today’s top DevOps challenges and suggests solutions to overcome them.
Security professionals face an endless stream of vulnerabilities that far exceeds their capacity to remediate them all. The secret to effective security lies in developing a strategic approach that prioritizes the most important issues. In this article, David Galiata, a security engineering director, explains how to systematically reduce risk while building organizational capabilities that can adapt to new threats.
Ansible’s register variables make playbooks more dynamic by capturing task output for future use. This allows workflows to adapt intelligently by enabling conditional execution, smarter state handling, and structured debugging. In this article, Sumeet Ninawe covers how register variables work and why they are essential in Ansible automation.
Both GitOps and infrastructure as code (IaC) define and manage infrastructure through code, but they have different approaches, workflows, and objectives. Primarily, IaC defines the infrastructure, whereas GitOps controls how that definition is applied and maintained continuously in production using Git as the single source of truth. In this article, Mariusz Michalowski explores the relationship and key differences between GitOps and IaC.
At a recent OpenTofu Day, David Jackson, VP of Cloud Automation and Tooling at Fidelity Investments, shared the story of how a leading financial services company migrated successfully from Terraform to OpenTofu. In this article, he talks to James Humphries, OpenTofu Maintainer and Technical Steering Committee Member, about the process.
Join Marcin Wyszynski, Spacelift Co-founder & CPO, and Tim Davis, Spacelift Technical Product Marketing Manager, for a first look at 𝗦𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗳𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁, the new deployment model that brings natural language to infrastructure management.
In this live session, you’ll see:
Why IaC remains essential for production — but overkill for prototypes and tests
How Spacelift Intent lets you provision infrastructure using just natural language
Where 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 fits alongside Terraform and GitOps in your workflows
How to transition from fast, intent-based provisioning to full IaC pipelines when necessary
Will you be in San Francisco for GitHub Universe, GitHub’s annual global event for developers, enterprise leaders, and security professionals? Spacelift will be there as a Bronze Sponsor, so be sure to drop by Booth #119 to say hello!
If you didn’t get a chance to read our previous issue, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered. Each edition of Mission Infrastructure is packed with insights, industry trends, and practical guides you won’t want to miss.
Spacelift Co-founder and CPO Marcin Wyszynski spoke to Mike Vizard about Spacelift Intent, explaining that the new product translates infrastructure requests directly into an API that interacts with an LLM or AI agent via the Anthropic MCP. He explained that this approach enables IT teams to describe the task they want an AI agent to execute on their behalf in natural language — no knowledge of Terraform or the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) required.
The “Use Git checkout” option is now generally available in VCS integration settings. This update gives customers more flexibility and control over how repositories are checked out, including support for sparse checkout in stack settings. Git sparse checkout allows you to check out only a subset of files from a repository, rather than the entire working directory. This is particularly useful for large repositories where you only need to work with specific directories or files.
We've enhanced the keyboard shortcuts in the Run view to align user experience across all platforms and browsers. This involved standardizing our shortcuts to use a consistent modifier pattern (Ctrl+Alt on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Opt on Mac) to:
Prevent conflicts with browser and system shortcuts
Function reliably across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge
Safeguard against unintended triggers that could interrupt your workflow
