Best of Spacelift — 2025

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Article
Spacelift·1y
GitLab vs GitHub : Key Differences in 2025
GitLab and GitHub are leading Git-hosting platforms with distinctive features. GitLab offers a fully integrated DevOps platform including CI/CD, security scanning, and infrastructure management out of the box, making it ideal for enterprises. GitHub, best known for its code hosting and collaboration capabilities, relies on third-party tools for extensive DevOps functionalities but excels in ease of use, community support, and integrations. Both platforms support AI-powered coding assistants, but GitLab's additional security and compliance features provide an edge for large organizations.
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20
2
Article
Spacelift·1y
Podman vs. Docker: Containerization Tools Comparison
Podman and Docker are two leading container platforms offering distinct features. Podman, developed by Red Hat, operates daemonless and supports rootless containers, enhancing security and system integration. Docker, highly popular for its ease of use, operates on a daemon-based architecture and has a rich ecosystem with broad third-party support. Both tools use OCI-compliant images allowing interoperability. While Docker's Swarm mode facilitates orchestration, Podman's design aligns closely with Kubernetes. Each tool is suitable for different use cases, with Podman excelling in secure, system-integrated environments and Docker being ideal for general development workflows.
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3
Article
Spacelift·1y
15 GitOps Best Practices to Improve Your Workflows
GitOps uses Git repositories as the source of truth for managing infrastructure and application configurations, driving efficiency and reliability in software delivery. This guide outlines 15 best practices for scaling GitOps workflows, such as automating processes with CI/CD pipelines, applying declarative configuration, enabling drift detection, and nurturing a GitOps culture within teams. Key tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and Kubernetes help implement these practices, ensuring consistency and reducing manual interventions. Adopting GitOps can lead to more predictable and maintainable infrastructure management, enhancing operational flexibility across different environments and cloud providers.
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4
Article
Spacelift·45w
10 Most Popular GitHub Actions Alternatives for CI/CD
Compares 10 popular CI/CD alternatives to GitHub Actions, including Spacelift, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps, and others. Each tool offers unique advantages like cost efficiency, customization, scalability, or compliance features. The comparison covers key features, licensing, and use cases to help teams choose the right CI/CD solution based on their specific requirements, infrastructure preferences, and ecosystem integration needs.
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5
Article
Spacelift·36w
Upgrading Our Infrastructure with OpenTofu
TrueCar migrated over 700 infrastructure stacks from Terraform to OpenTofu following HashiCorp's license change to Business Source License. The migration involved upgrading all stacks to Terraform 1.5.5, then moving to OpenTofu 1.6.2, and finally to OpenTofu 1.9.0. Key challenges included managing multiple versions, coordinating changes across a monorepo, and preventing accidental Terraform usage. OpenTofu's early variable evaluation feature enabled dynamic state file configuration that automatically breaks Terraform compatibility, eliminating the risk of state corruption from mixed tool usage.
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Article
Spacelift·50w
Docker Container Logs: How to View & Manage
Docker container logs capture stdout and stderr output from containerized applications. The docker logs command provides various options to view, filter, and follow logs including timestamps, time ranges, and tail functionality. Docker stores logs locally by default using the json-file driver, but supports external logging drivers for production environments. Best practices include using centralized logging systems, structured logging formats, and proper log rotation to prevent disk space issues.
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Article
Spacelift·44w
Blue/Green Deployments With Terraform & Kubernetes
Blue/green deployments enable zero-downtime application updates by maintaining two identical environments - one serving production traffic (blue) and another for testing new versions (green). This comprehensive guide demonstrates implementing blue/green deployments in Kubernetes using Terraform, covering the complete workflow from initial deployment through traffic switching and rollback procedures. The tutorial includes practical examples with a Flask application, Docker containerization, and Kubernetes resource management, plus best practices for automation, testing, and handling stateful applications with database considerations.
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8
Article
Spacelift·1y
21 Best DevSecOps Tools and Platforms for 2025
DevSecOps integrates security practices into the software development lifecycle, combining development, operations, and security tasks to deliver reliable software efficiently. The post explores key DevSecOps tools for 2025, highlighting their benefits, roles they support, and their integration into regular workflows. The selection includes tools like Spacelift for infrastructure management, GitLab for comprehensive CI/CD and security, Open Policy Agent for policy governance, Kubernetes for container orchestration, and many more.
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Article
Spacelift·1y
What is DevOps Automation? Best Practices & Benefits
DevOps automation involves using tools and technologies to automate software development, deployment, and operations processes, enhancing efficiency and quality. This includes automating builds, testing, cloud infrastructure provisioning, environment configuration, monitoring, alerts, and backups. Best practices include starting small, using IaC for provisioning, shifting security left, standardizing tools, and adopting deployment strategies like blue/green or canary. Platforms like Spacelift offer comprehensive IaC management to streamline these processes, ensuring consistency, speed, transparency, and scalability.
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10
Article
Spacelift·1y
Kubernetes DNS: Implementation, Services, Name Resolution
Kubernetes DNS simplifies networking by implementing name resolution and service discovery for Pods and Services. CoreDNS, the preferred DNS service, provides scalable and flexible DNS resolution, enhancing communication within clusters. Key benefits include automatic service discovery, simplified networking, and scalability. Troubleshooting tips, comparison between CoreDNS and kube-dns, and customization of DNS resolution are also covered.
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Article
Spacelift·52w
20+ Top Most Popular DevOps Platforms in 2025
A comprehensive overview of 20+ popular DevOps platforms in 2025, including GitLab, GitHub, AWS, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and specialized tools like Spacelift for infrastructure orchestration. The guide covers key features, pricing, and use cases for each platform, helping teams choose between all-in-one solutions versus specialized tools for different DevOps lifecycle stages like CI/CD, infrastructure management, monitoring, and deployment automation.
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Article
Spacelift·38w
GitOps vs Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Differences & Overlaps
GitOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are complementary but distinct practices. IaC focuses on defining infrastructure through code, while GitOps governs how that infrastructure is continuously deployed and maintained using Git as the single source of truth. Key differences include GitOps using pull-based workflows with continuous reconciliation versus IaC's typically push-based, CI-triggered approach. GitOps emphasizes automated deployment and compliance through Git, while IaC concentrates on infrastructure provisioning and definition. Together, they enable scalable, secure, and automated infrastructure management.
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Article
Spacelift·1y
CI/CD Best Practices – Top 11 Tips for Successful Pipelines
Discover 11 vital CI/CD best practices to enhance your pipelines, including the distinctions between continuous delivery and deployment, the importance of using version control, automation strategies, and securing your CI/CD environment. Start small, validate processes, and scale responsibly. Learn how tools like Spacelift simplify infrastructure management and support robust CI/CD workflows.
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Article
Spacelift·1y
13 Top Kubernetes Alternatives for Containers in 2025
Kubernetes is a popular container orchestration system, but there are other alternatives that might better suit certain use cases. This guide explores 13 top Kubernetes alternatives including Red Hat OpenShift, Hashicorp Nomad, Apache Mesos & Marathon, Docker Swarm, and Amazon ECS. These alternatives can provide benefits like reduced complexity, better developer experiences, and improved integration with other tools. Each alternative offers unique features and is suitable for different types of workloads and environments.
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15
Article
Spacelift·52w
Automation with Ansible AWX [Step-by-Step Guide]
Ansible AWX is an open-source web-based interface for Ansible automation that provides a centralized dashboard for managing playbooks, inventories, credentials, and job templates. The guide covers AWX's key features including role-based access control, job scheduling, and notifications, while explaining its relationship to Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform. It provides a comprehensive step-by-step walkthrough of setting up AWX using Docker Compose, creating inventories and projects, configuring SSH credentials, building job templates, and executing playbooks to automate Nginx installation on Ubuntu servers.
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Article
Spacelift·49w
OpenTofu 1.10: Major Updates for Modern IaC
OpenTofu 1.10 introduces major features including OCI registry support for distributing providers and modules, native S3 backend locking without DynamoDB, global provider cache locking, and multi-project PostgreSQL state management. The project joined CNCF as a Sandbox project and is approaching 10 million GitHub downloads with strong enterprise adoption. Key improvements include module variable deprecation, advanced resource migration capabilities, and enhanced removed block behavior. The release demonstrates OpenTofu's commitment to community-driven development and positions it as a mature, open-source alternative for infrastructure as code.
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Article
Spacelift·1y
Bicep vs. Terraform – Differences & Key Features Comparison
Bicep and Terraform are both Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools with distinct features. Bicep, designed by Microsoft, is Azure-specific, simplifying Azure resource deployment with a modular, accessible domain-specific language (DSL). In contrast, Terraform, created by HashiCorp, is cloud-agnostic and supports multi-cloud configurations through its provider ecosystem. Terraform requires state management files, while Bicep leverages Azure Resource Manager for state tracking. Each tool aligns with different use cases, with Bicep being ideal for Azure-focused teams, and Terraform offering broader cloud deployment capabilities.
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Article
Spacelift·1y
Top 18 Continuous Deployment (CD) Tools for 2025
Continuous deployment (CD) tools automate the process of delivering code, increasing deployment speed and reducing manual intervention. These tools need robust monitoring, rollback mechanisms, and flexibility. Some of the top CD tools for 2025 include Spacelift, GitLab CI, Argo CD, Buddy, Octopus Deploy, AWS CodeDeploy, Jenkins, Semaphore, and Spinnaker, each with unique features tailored for different use cases and environments.
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Article
Spacelift·1y
Top 7 Ansible Tower / Automation Controller Alternatives
Searching for the best alternatives to Ansible Tower, also known as Ansible Automation Controller, can help you find more cost-effective and customizable solutions for configuration management. This post evaluates seven significant alternatives, including Spacelift, AWX, Rundeck, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and Semaphore UI. Each alternative provides different advantages in pricing, functionality, and integration capabilities, making them suitable for various organizational needs.
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Article
Spacelift·46w
GitHub Actions Workflows: How to Create and Manage
GitHub Actions workflows are YAML-based CI/CD pipelines that automate software building, testing, and deployment processes. Workflows consist of jobs that run in parallel by default, with each job containing sequential steps. They're triggered by repository events like pushes, pull requests, or schedules. Key features include matrix builds for testing across multiple environments, job dependencies using the 'needs' keyword, environment variables, and concurrency controls. The platform supports reusable actions from the GitHub Marketplace and allows integration with external tools through custom actions.
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Article
Spacelift·51w
How to Implement Ansible Automation Workflows
Ansible automation workflows can be implemented through four main approaches: using a remote server (traditional but limited), generic CI/CD pipelines (standardized with better testing), Ansible Automation Platform/AWX (specialized tools with UI and scheduling), or infrastructure orchestration platforms like Spacelift (multi-tool support with advanced observability). Each approach has trade-offs between complexity, cost, features, and scalability. Modern implementations favor CI/CD integration or specialized platforms for better automation, testing, and visibility compared to manual server-based approaches.
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Article
Spacelift·36w
Docker Multistage Builds: How to Optimize Your Images
Docker multistage builds enable developers to use multiple base images in a single Dockerfile, allowing complex build processes while keeping final images lightweight. By copying only necessary files between stages, developers can reduce image sizes, improve build efficiency, and simplify Dockerfile maintenance. The technique is particularly useful for separating build tools from runtime environments, such as compiling code in one stage and deploying only the compiled output in a minimal final image.
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Article
Spacelift·51w
Terraform vs. Jenkins: Key Differences Explained
Terraform and Jenkins serve different but complementary roles in DevOps automation. Terraform focuses on infrastructure as code (IaC) for provisioning and managing cloud resources across multiple providers using HCL, while Jenkins handles CI/CD workflows for building, testing, and deploying applications using Groovy-based pipelines. The article provides detailed examples of both tools, including a complete Azure VM deployment with Terraform and a Maven-based build pipeline with Jenkins. While they can work independently, combining them creates powerful automated workflows that handle both infrastructure provisioning and application deployment, with Jenkins often triggering Terraform runs as part of deployment processes.
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Article
Spacelift·43w
5 Methods to Keep Docker Container Running for Debugging
Docker containers stop when their foreground process terminates, making debugging challenging. Five methods can keep containers running for debugging: overriding commands with interactive shells, using 'tail -f /dev/null', using 'sleep infinity', committing container state to new images, and wrapping entrypoints with custom scripts. Additional debugging practices include checking container logs and exit codes, using shell sessions to investigate environments, implementing monitoring systems, and considering process managers like supervisord for advanced scenarios.
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Spacelift·39w
Ansible Register: How to Store and Reuse Task Output
Ansible register variables capture task output for reuse in later playbook steps, enabling dynamic decision-making and conditional execution. The register keyword stores command results including stdout, stderr, and return codes in structured variables. Common use cases include debugging command outputs, implementing conditional logic based on system state, and processing data in loops. Best practices emphasize descriptive naming, selective usage, and proper error handling with ignore_errors.
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