Spacelift has made available an on-premises edition of a platform for automating the provisioning and management of IT infrastructure that previously was only accessible via a software-as-a-service application.
Company CEO Pawel Hytry said the on-premises edition of the platform satisfies both the requirements of highly regulated industries and the emergence of sovereign cloud requirements that stipulate data must remain within a specific geographic region.
Regardless of whether this edition of Spacelift is deployed in a local data center or in a cloud service that ensures IT infrastructure is restricted to a single availability zone, the Spacelift observability platform can now be deployed in a way that satisfies any compliance requirement, he added.
It’s not clear how many organizations that previously relied on a SaaS edition of the platform might be required to shift toward an on-premises edition because of sovereign cloud requirements that have risen in the wake of recent globe trade tensions. Organizations in Europe have now become especially sensitive to dependence on IT infrastructure that might reside in the U.S. out of fear that the U.S. government might impose additional restrictions in the form of, for example, a tariff on digital services.
It’s also unclear how many providers of SaaS platforms might need to address similar sovereign cloud requirements, but it’s evident IT teams will soon have a lot more deployment options to consider.
In the meantime, Spacelift is making a case for a platform that makes it easier to enforce best practices across the infrastructure-as-code tools that application developers routinely use to provision IT infrastructure. The challenge organizations are encountering is that much of that infrastructure is misconfigured in ways that enable cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, a recent Spacelift survey found that only 14% of respondents have fully implemented infrastructure automation best practices. The bulk of organizations, in fact, have simply created various islands of automation that they then attempt to manually integrate using multiple scripts, noted Hytry.
Hopefully, with the rise of platform engineering, more of the management of infrastructure will become automated. A recent survey conducted by Futurum Research finds that adoption of platform engineering as a methodology for building and deploying applications at scale is gaining significant traction, with more than a quarter of respondents (26%) having mastered platform engineering, compared to 41% who are still working toward applying platform engineering across multiple projects. Another 24% are still working toward operationalizing a set of best practices for platform engineering, while 7% are just getting started.
Roughly half of platform engineering teams provide cloud/multi-cloud management (52%) and dev/test/production environment support (48%). DevOps toolchains (43%), standard platform configurations (42%), and containers/Kubernetes (41%) support are also prevalent.
Regardless of the approach to IT infrastructure automation, the need to unify the management of platforms has become a more pressing issue. Each platform an organization deploys tends to increase the total cost of IT simply because an additional team of IT professionals is usually required to manage it. Hopefully, as more artificial intelligence (AI) is applied to the management of IT infrastructure, the ability to scale those teams will significantly increase in the months and years ahead.
