Spacelift, the company behind the leading infrastructure orchestration platform, unveiled Spacelift Intent, a pioneering open-source deployment model designed to provision cloud infrastructure through natural language eliminating the need to write or maintain HCL. Intent is available as an open-source solution, as well as an early access commercial version integrated within the Spacelift Infrastructure Orchestration Platform.
This innovation gives DevOps and Platform teams a choice: continue using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and GitOps for mission-critical workloads, or adopt Spacelift Intent for non-critical workloads that demand speed and agility without compromising governance or control.
A Complementary Approach, Not a Replacement
While Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and GitOps remain the gold standard for production systems ensuring repeatability, security, and operational rigor not all workloads require this level of process. Prototypes, tests, and hackathon projects often face unnecessary delays, with every request routed through the same formal process. This has historically slowed innovation, frustrated developers, and made DevOps and Platform teams a bottleneck. Previous attempts to apply AI focused on producing HCL faster, but failed to address the root of the inefficiency.
Spacelift Intent introduces a second, agentic path that accelerates infrastructure provisioning while removing the need to write and maintain HCL.
“Vibe coding has transformed how software is built, yet infrastructure automation is still stuck back in time,” said Marcin Wyszynski, co-founder and chief R&D officer at Spacelift. “DevOps and Platform teams are writing HCL while their developer peers are prototyping and shipping features at lightning speed. With Intent, we asked, what if we could bring vibe coding to infrastructure provisioning, in a way that’s safe, governed and complementary to IaC? That’s what we’ve delivered with Spacelift Intent.”
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According to Gartner® Research in How Platform Engineering Teams Can Augment DevOps With AI, “AI offers advantages beyond traditional automation to help product teams manage their software delivery infrastructure in a reliable, sustainable and cost-effective manner.” The report recommends that “software engineering leaders driving platform engineering initiatives should optimize software delivery infrastructure by providing self-service access to AI-enabled infrastructure management capabilities as part of internal developer platforms.”
“I see Spacelift’s approach to integrating AI and IaC as ideal; it is flexible, open, governed and able to satisfy speed and precision,” said Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research. “By having two happy paths to deployment for workloads of different criticality, this becomes a force multiplier. It also solves much of the toil that leads to platform engineering being seen as a roadblock and not an enabler. This has the potential to change the narrative.”
Open Source and Commercial Options
Spacelift Intent is offered as both an open-source solution and an early access commercial version. The commercial version leverages the Spacelift Infrastructure Orchestration Platform’s policy and security controls, allowing DevOps and Platform teams to manage exactly who can deploy infrastructure, what resources are provisioned, and where deployments occur. Teams also gain full visibility into deployed resources and the reasoning behind each action executed by Intent.
Key Features
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Natural Language Provisioning – Developers can interact with their preferred AI assistant or LLM via Model Context Protocol (MCP). Instead of generating code, Intent converts requests directly into provider API calls.
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Built on Open Foundations – Intent uses the same Terraform providers as traditional IaC workflows. If a resource works in Terraform, it works in Intent.
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Governed by Default – Inherits the Spacelift policy engine, state management, and audit trails, ensuring no resource is deployed outside of compliance.
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Seamless Evolution – Any resource created by Intent can be converted into full Terraform/OpenTofu code, allowing prototypes to transition effortlessly into production.
Spacelift Intent redefines infrastructure provisioning, empowering teams to accelerate delivery while maintaining compliance, governance, and operational visibility making it a versatile solution for modern DevOps and Platform engineering teams.
