Is Infrastructure as Code Dead? New Report Says It's on Life Support

It turns out that all that code isn't so magical after all. StackGen's "Stacked Up: The IaC Maturity Report" exposes the ugly underbelly of IaC, painting a picture of frustrated developers, overwhelmed platform engineers, and executives staring down the barrel of missed deadlines and blown budgets.

The report shows that 97% of IaC users report difficulties, with developers viewing it as a necessary evil that slows down application deployment. Executives, meanwhile, are concerned that IaC is hindering teams from achieving critical performance metrics like deployment frequency, change failure rate, and time to restore service.

This misalignment across roles has created bottlenecks in the software delivery lifecycle, leading to a growing consensus that IaC needs to evolve — or be replaced.

With 65% of current IaC adopters eager for new technologies to improve infrastructure provisioning and deployment, Infrastructure from Code (IfC) provides an innovative solution. IfC automatically generates IaC from application source code with built-in security and compliance, benefiting executives, managers, and development teams alike.

IaC: The bottleneck nobody saw coming

Remember those promises of effortless scalability and bulletproof security? Well…

Reliability and security nightmares: Over half of the respondents (56%) reported struggling to keep configurations consistent, and 54% are tangled in a web of mismatched tools.

Development velocity? More like a development sloth: A measly 13% of companies have mastered IaC. The rest? 56% of developers are wasting 20% of their time wrestling with infrastructure instead of building killer apps.

Misalignment between executives and users: Developers are frustrated with the cognitive load required to manage IaC, platform engineers struggle with misconfigurations, and executives demand faster, more reliable results.

98% of respondents state that their organization needs more IaC expertise: Writing effective IaC is identified as the top area for process improvement across roles, with 43% highlighting it as a priority. Governance and security follow at 32%. Other critical areas for improvement include documentation, consistency, management, and better support for specific application needs.

93% agree innovation is needed: Respondents overwhelmingly agree that IaC needs to be automated and more streamlined to unlock its full potential.

The verdict is in: IaC needs a reboot

The writing's on the wall: IaC is choking innovation. Nearly two-thirds of IaC users are desperate for better infrastructure management. Enter Infrastructure from Code (IfC).

Think of IfC as IaC's smarter, more agile younger sibling. IfC automatically generates IaC from your application's source code, baking in security and compliance from the get-go. It's the upgrade everyone's been waiting for.

“What we are seeing is that IaC hasn’t solved all the problems of infrastructure provisioning,” says Asif Awan, co-founder and chief product officer of StackGen. “It got us halfway there, but the complexity and expertise needed to make it foolproof have been lacking.

Even Gartner is on board. Their Hype Cycle for Platform Engineering, 2024, confirms what everyone's thinking: we need higher-level abstractions to keep pace with the speed of modern development. Although only 22% of respondents are currently familiar with IfC, they believe it will gain traction among companies seeking improvements in release velocity, application stability, and developer productivity.

“IfC helps overcome the challenges with IaC marking the beginning of the end for IaC as we know it, as organizations look to solutions like IfC to meet their business goals faster and with greater reliability,” adds Awan.

Bottom line

The findings of this report are clear: IaC is not meeting the needs of many companies. Data engineers are looking for more automated, streamlined, and secure solutions.

IfC is a promising new technology that has the potential to address these needs. Data engineers should keep an eye on IfC and consider adopting it in their companies.

Image credit: iStockphoto/Iryna Shek