Spacelift announces expanded Ansible support, uniting Ansible and IaC automation

Bart: Welcome to Kube FM. Can you tell me about who you are, what your role is, and where you live?

Jean-Marc: My name is Jean-Marc Fontaine. I'm the Chief Product Officer at Spacelift.

Bart: Now, what do you want to share with me?

Jean-Marc: So, I'd like to talk about Spacelift, and more specifically, the new features we just released around Ansible orchestration. Spacelift is an infrastructure orchestration platform that manages your entire infrastructure lifecycle, including provisioning, configuration, and governance. Today, we're seeing some improvements to our Ansible support. Now, you can more easily deploy pieces of infrastructure with Ansible playbooks and automate that from beginning to end. What's very interesting, and what sets us apart from other tools, is that you now have deep observability into the outcome of those deployments. You can see at a glance if your hosts were successful in their deployments, and if specific deployments to multiple hosts were successful. When they were not, you can easily drill down to identify the root cause, fix it, and redeploy. This will save tons of time for engineers, as Ansible can be really difficult to navigate when it comes to failure.

Bart: In terms of the problems that Ansible itself solves, can you tell me about that?

Jean-Marc: I think Ansible and, more generally, infrastructure as code and configuration as code, which are what Spacelift manages, try to solve multiple problems like repeatability. However, they become difficult to use when you have multiple teams, many developers, and those teams tend to be silos. That's where we shine. We help orchestrate the tools, orchestrate collaboration between different teams, and ensure that things go smoothly, providing a comprehensive workflow that encompasses all of your tools.

Bart: Now, can you give me some more about the context before this announcement and then after? What's the difference?

Jean-Marc: In the past, teams that used Infrastructure as Code and teams that used Configuration as Code tended to work in isolation. For Infrastructure as Code, I'm thinking of OpenTofu, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation. For Configuration as Code, I'm thinking of Ansible and others. However, these teams often want their workflows to be the same because typically, you use Infrastructure as Code to spin up servers, set up the network, the load balancer, and everything needed. But then, the server itself is treated as a black box - you need a server, and once it's up and running, that's it. That's when configuration management kicks in, getting inside that black box to configure it and ensure it's exactly what you need. This also helps with day two operations, keeping it up and running, and up to date. What Spacelift does is help bridge that gap, making sure you can have a single workflow that does both. You can have dependencies after your servers have been provisioned and configured by Ansible, for example. This helps create a comprehensive workflow for all infrastructure. Too often, we see our customers having a team start the process, stop, and then another team picks it up and goes further, causing all kinds of issues.

Bart: So, for people who may not be aware, is Spacelift open source and part of the CNCF landscape?

Jean-Marc: That's a great question. Spacelift itself is not open source, but we actively use and contribute to open source technologies. We orchestrate well-known open source tools such as Ansible and OpenTofu, and we're actually a founding member of the OpenTofu project. Several of our engineers work full-time on OpenTofu, and we're proud to be its biggest contributor. OpenTofu is managed by the Linux Foundation and is currently submitted to the CNCF Foundation, so hopefully it will join soon.

Bart: What is Spacelift's business model?

Jean-Marc: We operate as a closed-core business model. We offer different deployment options, including SaaS, self-hosted, and a hybrid solution that is a mix of both, where we host the backend and you host your workers, allowing you to deploy in your own environment easily. We provide a wide range of plans tailored to different needs, from small teams to mid-sized companies and large enterprise companies, ensuring we have a plan for every need.

Bart: And who are Spacelift's main competitors?

Jean-Marc: We put them into two main categories. Indirectly, we compete with general-purpose CI/CD platforms like Jenkins and GitHub Actions. Typically, people start using the tools we orchestrate, such as Terraform, Ansible, and Pulumi, from their laptop, and at some point, they need to orchestrate and automate things. They usually go with those platforms because they're already familiar with them from application deployment processes and try to build some pipelines. This works for a little while, and at first, it helps them go faster. However, what we hear a lot is that people eventually start fighting the tool and run into limitations because most of those tools were not designed with trust and scale in mind. That's typically where people start looking for a specialized orchestration platform like Spacelift to make a real impact.

When we compare ourselves to the competition, we often see that they solve the same problem in a similar way. They tend to like the depth of our features and the richness of features. Also, they tend to support fewer tools; some of them even support only one tool. Our goal is not to push any specific tool's agenda; our goal is to serve our customers where they are. Whatever tool they need to do their job, we want to help them and provide support for that tool.

Looking at the other competitors out there, what helps Spacelift differentiate from the others is that we support a lot of infrastructure and configuration tools, namely Terraform, Ansible, Terragrunt, AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi, and even more flavors of those, like AWS CDK, CDKTF, and AWS. It's a pretty comprehensive list. We also have support for Kubernetes for container orchestration if you need it. That is one big thing; most of our competitors do not have such a breadth. Actually, none of them have support for so many tools. Some of them only support one or two.

When it comes to support, it doesn't just mean support; it depends on how much you support and how deeply you support those tools. We tend to go deeper than that. Another thing we do a lot is trying to help with orchestration. One example is that you can have different deployment pipelines that use different technologies and still be connected and trigger in some cascading phase to allow you to create elaborate workflows that span across different technologies. For example, if I go back to my example before, you could use Terraform to spin up servers, and then, in turn, it will trigger an Ansible deployment pipeline to actually configure those servers you just created. And then you could still have something else that runs after that, and they can run in parallel. You can have all kinds of models here.

Bart: So Jean-Marc, what can we expect from Spacelift in the near future? What are the next steps after this release?

Jean-Marc: That's a great question. We want to double down on the recent Ansible release and further bridge the gap between cloud and on-prem environments. As I said earlier today, we see a lot of isolation of people being siloed in those environments, and we believe that companies actually want to be in both and have the need for such a tool. Additionally, we will also be making Spacelift even more relevant and user-friendly for enterprise-scale operations to meet the needs of those companies.

Bart: Thank you, Bart. I'm excited that the release has come out. I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Jean-Marc: Take care. Thank you, Bart.