Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2025. Read them in this 17th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Asif Awan, Founder and Chief Product Officer at StackGen
In 2024, organizations continued to struggle with writing and maintaining Infrastructure as Code (IaC) according to Stacked Up: The IaC Maturity Report. The report surveyed 315 individuals with direct responsibility for IaC in either a hands on or managerial capacity, discovering that only 13% of organizations had actually achieved IaC maturity. Almost all organizations (97%), including those that considered their practice mature, continued to report difficulties with IaC, particularly for those trying to manage and learn multiple tools and enforce consistent configurations across all environments. Despite these challenges, however, IaC remains a standard and an important practice-one that organizations must leverage to ensure scalability and agility in cloud-native environments. There is a lack of other better options available today.
Further complicating the challenges many engineering teams already face with IaC, the industry itself is changing significantly. One major change came from HashiCorp, which is known for its popular IaC and DevOps tools (including Terraform and Vault). First, HashiCorp replaced Terraform’s open-source Mozilla licence with a more restrictive Business Source License (BSL 1.1), a change that many developers and partners had a negative reaction to. In response, the community created an open source Terraform fork, now called OpenTofu, which currently has a significant following among users concerned about vendor lock-in. Then, further disrupting the IaC space, IBM announced its intention to acquire HashiCorp. This acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2024, signaling consolidation and innovation in the IaC ecosystem. Exactly how HashiCorp will operate in 2025 remains to be seen, however. Finally, GenAI has had a profound impact on the amount of code generated, demanding infrastructure that can keep up. The high velocity on the left hand side is mounting more pressure on the infrastructure teams and processes.
The Current State of IaC
The Stacked Up report showed that while a small percentage of organizations did achieve full maturity, with automated provisioning and deployment across all environments, most continue to struggle. 39% of respondents shared that their maturity was “established” (meaning they are still working towards more consistent and repeatable processes), and another 42% still see their maturity as a work in progress. The remaining 7% is barely there or just getting started with IaC.
Some of the most critical challenges these organizations struggle with include:
- Difficulty enforcing consistent configurations across environments (56%)
- Trouble managing multiple tools, leading to steep learning curves and compatibility issues (54%)
- Unclear ownership of IaC responsibilities (45%)
Perhaps tied to all of these challenges, 98% of survey respondents indicated a need for more IaC expertise within their organizations. The cognitive load of HashiCorp language creates more burden on organizations to their existing workloads. Undoubtedly, more IaC expertise could help in terms of identifying ways to enforce consistency, minimize tools, and create clearer ownership roles for IaC responsibilities. But more than finding the right talent, organizations need to look for innovative solutions that make IaC easier for everyone to use, from platform engineers to DevOps teams to application teams.
It’s Time for IaC Innovation
The Stacked Up report respondents agree that it’s time for a change-93% shared that innovation is needed to streamline IaC processes and make them faster. The current approach needs incremental changes and eventually a radical rethink. Not only that, practitioners using IaC are hoping for new tools that integrate security and compliance directly into IaC workflows, truly shifting security left. These capabilities would eliminate many of the issues organizations struggle with today as they deploy applications at scale in cloud environments. It’s also time to simplify the process of writing IaC; developers currently find IaC a necessary, but painful distraction from core tasks. They want tools that are easier to use so they can deploy with confidence and focus their efforts on the application, not the infrastructure.
What to Look for in IaC in 2025
In the year ahead, organizations are going to put greater focus on automation and management tools. Engineering teams will seek tools that span the full lifecycle management of infrastructure, addressing both provisioning and maintenance needs. More organizations will embrace Infrastructure from Code (IfC) solutions as they mature and gain momentum in the technosphere. Rapidly maturing generative IfC solutions enable infrastructure to be generated directly from application code or state files, cloud environments, or from visual design (topology views), with security and compliance guardrails built in automatically. For example, after launching in 2024, the StackGen Generative Infrastructure from Code solution enables organizations to accelerate cloud migration, modernize infrastructure, and improve the developer experience.
2025 will see organizations look to maximize their existing investment in IaC. That requires embracing tools that standardize environments, reduce risk, and streamline operations. Generative IfC can also simplify code creation, reduce errors, and accelerate deployment processes. And because IfC ensures that the infrastructure generated automatically aligns to industry best practices and internal standards, developer experience and their delivery velocity will dramatically improve as adoption grows.
Embrace the Future of IaC
The year ahead will see a seismic shift towards innovative solutions that allow enterprises to modernize infrastructure for agility and scale. They’ll also embrace cloud incentives, including migrating to new clouds and implementing multi-cloud strategies, while IfC will enable developers to deploy quickly without becoming infrastructure experts.
Enterprise organizations want to focus on game-changing, innovative applications and services while being agile, cost-efficient, and reliable -all while embracing AI. As we move into 2025, IfC will become part of the tool chest for ensuring this competitive advantage.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Asif Awan, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at StackGen, is a visionary leader with a passion for applying disruptive technologies across diverse domains.
With over 25 years of experience as a builder and technologist, and more than a decade as an entrepreneur, Asif has an eye for identifying early macro signals of major technological disruptions. His expertise includes architecting, developing, and managing large-scale distributed cloud-native applications and infrastructure.
In addition to his role at StackGen, Asif is an advisor and investor in ventures, including Vieu, Croquet, Jvion, Reventics, Ameya World School, and Arlo Skye. He excels in assembling and leading large cross-functional teams.
In his previous role as the Founder and CEO of Videspan, Asif pioneered a cloud-agnostic no-code MLOps platform, revolutionizing the lifecycle of Machine Learning models. As a Board Member at Croquet, Asif contributed to developing a powerful decentralized compute platform, transforming collaborative edge/5G applications.
With a proven track record of innovation, Asif continues to shape the future of technology and business.
