Written by editor James Bourne 

A schism currently exists between developers and executives with regard to infrastructure as code (IaC) tooling. But is 2025 set to see that gap potentially close?

According to StackGen's IaC Maturity Report, most developers (60%) see their knowledge of IaC ' the process of provisioning and managing infrastructure through machine-readable definition files as opposed to physical hardware configuration, as a work in progress, whereas executives (44%) feel more knowledgeable. Developers usually spend more than 10 hours a week on IaC, yet executives expect it to be less than five hours. Ultimately, almost half (46%) of developers polled said they viewed IaC as a 'necessary evil distract[ing] from their core work.'

Necessary evil or not, IaC is here to stay: it is now all-but ubiquitous. Firefly's 2024 State of Infrastructure as Code report calls it a 'de facto standard'. 90% of cloud users surveyed said they were using IaC, and half said most of their engineers were 'IaC-literate', comfortable coding in Terraform and CloudFormation among others. More than a quarter (26%) of those polled said they had the equivalent of at least two full-time engineers per month writing infrastructure as code.

Not surprisingly, AI is touching how IaC is used and adopted. 20% said AI code generation had a 'significant' effect on IaC adoption, and wider effects around usage, policy creation and remediation were noted. ' 

Yet it is not all smooth sailing. Governance remains an issue. 40% of respondents said their organisations potentially spent weeks resolving 'drift', where the IaC and its underlying cloud configuration go out of sync. This issue inevitably has to be resolved manually. Yet as the Firefly report noted, visibility is now becoming a bigger concern.

As cloud complexity continues to rise ' almost a quarter of those polled said they had more than 100 accounts with 12% having more than 500 ' visibility is hindered. StackGen puts it succinctly: just because you have an IaC tool, it doesn't remove the need for deep knowledge of creating and managing infrastructure components, provisioning and configuring services and resources, and keeping up with configuration changes.

Another major change, though not on the technical side, has seen HashiCorp, provider of Terraform, moving to the Business Source Licence (BSL) model in August 2023. Organisations must abide by BSL if they build infrastructure with a commercial goal in mind.

18 months on, it has altered the space. 30% of survey respondents in the Firefly IaC report said the move was disruptive for them, and while Terraform remains the most popular framework currently, it was the least popular for future developments. OpenTofu, an open source Terraform fork, has subsequently gained popularity. According to data from Terramate, one in five greenfield projects now begin with OpenTofu.

Innovative startups have therefore spotted a gap in the market and are looking to remedy these supposed weaknesses. StackGen itself promotes what it calls 'infrastructure from code' (IfC), defined as automating infrastructure generation from any source, from application code to cloud environments.

Bluebricks, who raised $4.5 million ('3.57m) in September, has developed what it calls its 'Atomic Infrastructure' technology, where the goal is to provide total visibility into organisations' clouds with infinite scalability. The infrastructure aims to restructure traditional IaC modules and break them down from massive states into small and reusable blueprints, with no refactoring required.

Other companies are taking advantage of the potential of generative AI. Firefly itself, primarily a cloud asset management solution for more efficient infrastructure management, has a 'Compose AI' tool to enable developers to create new IaC through advanced GPT models. ControlMonkey, which pocketed $7 million in January as its platform launched, also offers AI-powered code generation and claims to be the only fully end-to-end Terraform automation platform.

System Initiative, meanwhile, is going about it in a completely different way, aiming to 'replace' IaC by allowing teams to define and manage infrastructure as a 'living architecture' through a visual interface. The company compares itself more with platforms such as Unity than with previous vendors whose attempts to 'simplify' DevOps through a drag and drop UI did not cut it for enterprise use cases.

So if you're a developer, IaC may currently be a necessary evil ' but there may be some tools in the pipeline which might help ease the pain.

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