If you work in DevOps, you’ve heard it a thousand times: “Do more with less.” More automation, more security, more reliability—but with the same (or fewer) people. Meanwhile, your development teams keep growing, pushing out new features at breakneck speed. Yet somehow, the infrastructure team is supposed to scale magically to keep up.

Let’s be real—this doesn’t work.

It’s not irrational for engineering leaders to prioritize hiring developers. That’s where the business sees direct value: Features, integrations, new customer experiences. But what happens when those features need to be deployed, maintained and secured? What happens when an overburdened DevOps team becomes a bottleneck instead of an enabler?

I’ve seen this story play out too many times. DevOps teams get stretched thin, firefighting rather than building. 

That’s where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) orchestration comes in. It’s not just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity for scaling DevOps without burning out your team.

Why DevOps Teams Become Bottlenecks

Traditionally, IT operations were considered a necessary evil—an auxiliary function that kept the lights on. Now, in the age of cloud and DevOps, those ops responsibilities have been fused into development teams. The idea was simple: Hire devs, have them do ops. Use their coding skills to automate away the drudgery.  It’s great in practice when it’s done right, but oftentimes, these teams end up not automating but simply owning the drudgery.

At the end of the day, instead of eliminating operational burdens, many organizations just shifted them. DevOps, SREs, CloudOps—whatever you call them—these teams still end up being the gatekeepers. They own the application deployment pipelines, infrastructure lifecycle management, and security policies.

And like any team, they seek independence and control—not out of malice, but out of necessity. Think about it: If your job is to keep production stable, are you really going to let every dev push infrastructure changes willy-nilly? Of course not.

The result? Silos of unique responsibility and sacred internal knowledge. The very teams that were meant to empower developers become blockers instead.

Infrastructure as Code Alone Won’t Save You

A lot of teams turn to Infrastructure as Code to fix this. And to be clear, IaC is a game-changer.

With tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, and CloudFormation, infrastructure can be managed as code. No more clicking through cloud dashboards, no more inconsistent environments. Everything is version-controlled, reproducible, and (in theory) collaborative.

But here’s the problem: Vanilla IaC doesn’t scale well in practice.

1. It’s a single-player game. Sure, multiple engineers can work on the same infrastructure codebase—but without coordination, they’ll step on each other’s toes. Ask any DevOps engineer who’s seen a production database wiped because someone forgot to rebase their code.
2. It doesn’t handle complexity well. Infrastructure is a tangled mess of dependencies. At a certain scale, a single dependency graph just doesn’t cut it. I’ve seen teams hit a wall at 1,000+ resources, where every small change requires a full sync that takes forever and gets throttled by cloud APIs.
3. Ownership is a nightmare. The most secure approach is to lock down infrastructure changes to a small inner circle. But then we’re right back to the bottleneck problem. The alternative—giving developers free rein—can turn into a security disaster.

So what’s the answer? IaC orchestration.

How IaC Orchestration Changes the Game

IaC orchestration isn’t about replacing your existing tools; it’s about making them work at scale.

Think about how GitHub changed software development. Version control wasn’t new—but GitHub made it easier to collaborate, review code, and manage contributions without stepping on each other’s work.

That’s exactly what orchestration does for IaC.

It allows large teams to manage complex infrastructure without turning into a bottleneck. It enforces guardrails while enabling self-service for developers. And it solves the age-old tradeoff between speed and security—because let’s be honest, those two are typically at cross purposes.

With orchestration:

• Multiple teams can safely contribute to infrastructure code without chaos.
• Changes can be reviewed, tested, and approved before they reach production.
• Infrastructure can be broken into modular, manageable pieces.
• Security and compliance teams can enforce policies without blocking innovation.

Whether you build your own orchestration layer or use a dedicated tool, it’s the missing piece that allows DevOps to scale without just hiring more people.

Do You Really Need “IaC Experts”?

A lot of engineers hear “IaC orchestration” and assume it means they need to hire a bunch of specialists. Not true.

IaC itself is simple—most implementations are declarative. Writing Terraform is easier than writing JavaScript. It’s like HTML: You just connect building blocks that are already provided.

The real challenge isn’t the syntax—it’s understanding the infrastructure you’re codifying.

For example, if your organization runs on AWS, learning AWS is more important than learning Terraform. Once you understand how AWS works, mapping those concepts to IaC tools is the easy part.

That’s exactly how we train our engineers at Spacelift. If you don’t know AWS or a similar hyperscaler, we start there—because without that knowledge, only knowing Terraform syntax is useless.

And with orchestration, you don’t need deep IaC expertise to contribute safely. Guardrails are in place. You’re not giving developers a “blank check” to make changes; you’re giving them a controlled, self-service environment where they can move fast without breaking things.

DevOps is About More Than Just Automation

Here’s the hard truth: You won’t fix DevOps bottlenecks with automation alone.

The real challenge is team dynamics—who owns infrastructure, how changes are managed and how teams collaborate at scale.

Orchestration isn’t just a technical fix; it’s a cultural shift. It empowers developers while keeping infrastructure secure and reliable. It allows DevOps teams to stop firefighting and start enabling.

At the end of the day, DevOps should be an enabler, not a gatekeeper.

And that starts with fixing how we manage infrastructure at scale.