How Spacelift blends AI experimentation with GitOps governance 

Artificial intelligence adoption has been rapid and sometimes ungoverned, forcing infrastructure teams to respond quickly.

Spacelift Inc. provides an infrastructure-as-code management platform that helps organizations automate and streamline their workloads, AI or otherwise. The infrastructure orchestration platform creates predefined cloud workflows while meeting compliance requirements.

“The speed at which developers are adopting AI to assist with their coding has been … probably the fastest adoption I’ve seen in my life,” said Dimitri Vlachos (pictured), chief marketing officer of Spacelift. “That has direct ripple-down effects into infrastructure. The infrastructure teams … they’re feeling the pressure of the speed from the acceleration of developers and yet they’re feeling also, ‘How do I actually govern this at the same time?’”

Vlachos spoke with John Furrier, executive analyst at theCUBE Research, for the AWS Marketplace Series, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Spacelift’s role in cloud migration and the advantages of AWS Marketplace. (* Disclosure below.)

Fusing AI with traditional infrastructure pipelines

The second wave of AI — agents — is putting pressure on operations, as agentic experiments proliferate across the enterprise. Unlike a traditional IaC and GitOps pipeline, AI development involves many iterations. The solution is to combine GitOps workflows with AI-assisted ones, according to Vlachos.

“We offer an MCP [Model Context Protocol] server and your AI can connect to our MCP server, and we go right to the actual cloud providers,” he said. “You have one path where you can go very quickly, and we see a lot of people use that for experimentation. And when they’re ready … and get really to the point where they want to be in production, they can then promote that into a more traditional IaC and GitOps pipeline.”

Now available through AWS Marketplace, Spacelift can offer organizations a simpler purchasing process. When buying Spacelift or any other tool through AWS, the contract is incorporated into a customer’s existing agreements — a huge time-saver for Spacelift and its customers, Vlachos pointed out.

“Procurement can take as long as the rest of the process,” he said. “AWS makes that simple, not only for vendors, but also for the customer procuring. And if you’re already using a partner or a provider to help run your infrastructure — they’re very familiar with AWS — we can work with them as well. It’s both transactional but also operational benefits you see with AWS.”

Spacelift customers fall into three main categories: companies that are beginning their cloud migration journey and need Spacelift’s tools to manage it; organizations that use a traditional deployment tool and are seeking a more streamlined platform; and customers trying to keep up with AI. Spacelift’s biggest advantage is not just its intuitive user interface, but its ability to integrate with different tools,  according to Vlachos.

“You’d be surprised at how many people are getting their infrastructure orchestration up and running and their policies are not really being used,” he said. “That, to me, is really phase two, and that’s a little less of onboarding Spacelift as much as advancing your infrastructure program. It’s not just about the UI — it’s about how well you integrate with other tools. And that’s been a foundational principle of Spacelift from the very beginning.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Marketplace Series:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Marketplace Series. Neither AWS, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE