Spacelift Overages

What do you like best about the product?

Spacelift provides the guardrails needed to support a multi-team environment. It offers policy support for governance, delegation layers that balance security with self-service, and a local-preview feature that helps prevent “works on my machine” scenarios while enabling quick self-checks. On top of that, its state management and stack designs make day-to-day administration and overall organization easier.

The platform is also backed by a knowledgeable, responsive team. They work with you as a partner—supporting your activities, helping you reach your goals, and improving the product in ways that benefit your use cases.

What do you dislike about the product?

The hardest part about using Spacelift is making sure we’re delivering enough value to the company to justify the cost. There are other ways to manage our environment without Spacelift, so the conversation often becomes less about whether it works and more about whether it’s worth the spend. From a usability standpoint, it’s been great: we have our quarterly meetings and there’s basically nothing to complain about. At the same time, it has taken extra effort to explain the expense to the money people.

In the end, this isn’t really a Spacelift problem so much as a challenge of clearly communicating all the benefits the platform brings, including the “insurance” side of it—less money saved and more money not risked—by using Spacelift.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

In a multi-team environment we're able to use shared workloads without stepping on one another's toes. Issues that may arise are easier to troubleshoot with the auditing provided. Who ran what, when, and logs showing what occurred. Drift detection to highlight live changes and account for them.

Then the pure scale we're able to achieve. Our environment runs releases across 20+ AWS accounts at a time with 10+ stacks per environment. We're able to easily trigger and manage the stacks. And now with the AI assistant we're able to have it crawl those stacks and report on stack feedback details easily.

What do you like best about the product?

Spacelift, as a piece of software, has a lot of pros. From my point of view—and most importantly from a Platform Engineering perspective—it’s user-friendly, easy to use, and has a really nice UI.

We’re also always excited to see just how many features Spacelift offers.

On top of that, the Spacelift support team is absolutely the best and consistently super helpful.

What do you dislike about the product?

Honestly, there are very few things—if any—that we don’t like about Spacelift.

If I had to point to something, the Kubernetes support could be better, but we mainly started using it for its amazing Terraform support.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift is a great fit for what we’re trying to achieve as a Platform Engineering department: providing developers with an easy-to-use infrastructure deployment platform.

Thanks to it, our deployments are now faster than ever.

What do you like best about the product?

The policy-as-code engine is the standout feature for us — being able to define OPA-based policies to control who can approve and apply Terraform changes has greatly improved our governance over AWS infrastructure. Stack management is also solid, making it easy to organize and track deployments across multiple environments. The pull request preview feature is a big workflow win: engineers can see a Terraform plan directly in their PR before merging, which catches issues early and speeds up code review.

What do you dislike about the product?

The documentation is the weakest area. For example, we struggled to find clear guidance on security best practices for setting up Spacelift across an org, specifically how to scope IAM permissions per stack so each stack has only the access it needs. This is a common requirement but the docs don't walk you through it in a practical way.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Spacelift, managing Terraform deployments to AWS was largely manual and error-prone, with limited visibility into who ran what and when. Spacelift gave us a centralized place to manage all our stacks, enforce approval workflows through policies, and ensure changes go through a proper plan-and-apply cycle. The PR preview integration in particular reduced incidents caused by untested changes reaching production. Overall it has improved our deployment confidence and made infrastructure changes more auditable.

What do you like best about the product?

Spacelift goes beyond the basics of managing the lifecycle of OpenTofu and other IaC tools by adding useful constructs like spaces, contexts, and integrations that make managing a large number of configurations a scalable process. The web user interface is basic, but gives easy access to all the key information

One thing that really impressed me is the quality of the integration with GitHub repositories. Spacelift not only runs OpenTofu plans automatically for pushes and pull requests, but does so without any manual configurations or boilerplate workflows in the repositories. It also handles monorepos really well, only running plans only for stacks that are actually affected by changed files. And, it's possible to promote proposed changes all from within GitHub. The spacectl CLI is similarly well integrated, making it easy to integrate into local development workflows.

What do you dislike about the product?

The web interface is rather basic. It's focussed on one entity at a time (e.g., spaces, stacks, contexts), making it hard to get holistic views of things. For example, when I'm on the page for a space, I'd ideally like some sort of overview of the stacks and contexts in the space and drill down into them. Instead, I have to go to the stacks page and filter down to the space, the contexts page and filter down to the space, etc. There's also some rough edges and odd behaviours like action panels covering up lists, and weird list item selection behaviours.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Spacelift replaces individually run GitHub Actions workflows for Terraform and OpenTofu configs with a really nice framework for managing large infrastructure deployments. It provides good controls, organization, and visibility for infrastructure stacks, so that I can focus on managing my infrastructure and not the tool itself.

What do you like best about the product?

I love how Spacelift allows our small team to efficiently manage a large number of stacks, enabling us to configure and manage our infrastructure in a clean and sensible way. The simplicity of configuring Terraform through Spacelift is particularly impressive, as it streamlines our process and allows us to manage infrastructure dependencies smoothly. I appreciate the systematic and repeatable way it facilitates the rollout of applications and infrastructure, which is crucial for maintaining our operations. Additionally, the easy initial setup and the ability to write our own modules quickly were extremely beneficial. The support from Spacelift has also been exemplary, with their team providing substantial help during the setup process through calls and hands-on assistance, ensuring we could address any problems effectively. Being a long-time user, the consistency of their support over time has made our experience with Spacelift very positive.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find it sometimes quite difficult to configure the things we need in Spacelift. The configuration process can be challenging, especially when adding new configuration items, as the context needs to exist with those items in it. This requirement is understandable but it can be a bit of a hassle and causes an overhead.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I find Spacelift enables our small team to efficiently manage numerous stacks, configuring and maintaining infrastructure simply and sensibly. It enhances our ability to handle infrastructure and applications in a systematic, repeatable manner, ultimately supporting our infrastructural scalability.