Infrastructure as Code Is Suffering From Self-Inflicted Complexity

We’re adding more clouds, more tools and more automation — and then doing it all over again when things become unmanageable. It’s not working.

Jun 25th, 2025 2:06pm by Vicki Walker

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It’s been 20 years since Puppet planted the seeds of today’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and it hasn’t gotten any easier — in many ways, it’s more complicated than ever.

The early entrants, Puppet and Chef, gave way to tools like Ansible, Terraform and Pulumi, which brought new capabilities for infrastructure provisioning. Then cloud computing emerged and turned IaC into a fundamental software development practice. Now, we have OpenTofu stepping in to fill Terraform’s no-longer-open-source shoes, and GitOps integrating IaC with version control.

Despite the volatility, organizations clearly understand the value of IaC. According to Firefly’s 2025 State of IaC report, the vast majority of organizations — 89% — are using IaC, but only about 6% have fully codified their cloud. The result is severe complexity, characterized by inconsistency, poor stability, tooling fragmentation and slow development pipelines.

Where IaC Is Today

So where does this leave us? According to Firefly’s research, presented in a recent webinar with The New Stack, the 2025 State of IaC, we’re spiraling into self-inflicted complexity: adding more clouds, more tools and more automation — and then doing it all over again when things become unmanageable.

During our webinar, Inside the 2025 State of IaC: Tools, Trends, and Tactical Solutions, Ido Neeman, CEO and co-founder of Firefly, and Chris Pirillo, TNS host, dove into the reasons IaC is so difficult but doesn’t have to be. They reviewed findings — published and unpublished — from the State of IaC survey, and discussed what they indicate about the challenges and opportunities ahead.

During their wide-ranging conversation, Ido and Chris discussed:

The acceptable level of drift that enterprises can realistically tolerate.
What to do when different parts of the organization are using different IaC toolsets.
The practical challenges of achieving 100% IaC coverage and how to communicate that to leadership.
What you need to do to adopt CloudOps — over the short and long terms.
Other unpublished findings from the 2025 State of IaC.

Don’t miss out: Watch the webinar on demand today!

As senior sponsor editor at The New Stack, Vicki collaborates with our sponsors to create and publish exceptional content that resonates with our readers. She has many years of experience (more than she would prefer to admit) in technology publishing...