Copyright thenewstack
AI is changing the way developers code. How much change and whether it’s all positive is the source of endless debates, but the impact is here to stay. And once AI code gets even better, teams will ship features more often. None of this is true with regard to infrastructure. Deploying and maintaining environments that power applications, whether for testing or production, is a serious bottleneck. Most organizations still rely on ticket queues and manual reviews before anything moves to production, and some of the work relies heavily on tribal knowledge and almost artisanal work. So, while AI can generate OK-looking Terraform, the way cloud infrastructure is managed is still pre-generative AI. Why is that? The 3 Barriers to AI-Driven Infrastructure 1. No Context, No Organizational Knowledge Every company has different compliance frameworks, architecture and business needs, which results in different infrastructure. These aren’t captured in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) alone; they live in tribal knowledge across DevOps, platform and security teams. Ask an AI agent to spin up a database, and it might generate valid Terraform for an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Relational Database Service (RDS) instance. But it won’t know: Should this database be multiregion or single region? What’s the replication policy for disaster recovery? Which compliance standards apply to this data set? Without organizational context, AI may produce working code that’s technically correct but operationally dangerous — misconfigured, noncompliant or unsecure. And yes, you can ask AI to “learn” context from your existing infra setup, but is that enough? 2. Complex Tech Stacks and Hidden Dependencies Modern environments are a web of interconnected tools: Terraform, Helm, Ansible, cloud command line interfaces (CLIs) and custom scripts. AI can generate snippets for each layer, but orchestrating them correctly — in the right order, with dependency awareness — is a different challenge altogether. This is the dreaded Terralith, and generating yet another one is not a good place to start. Infrastructure isn’t deployed in isolation. A Kubernetes cluster depends on virtual private cloud (VPC) networking, identity and access management (IAM) policies, secrets, monitoring integrations and more. Missing or mis-sequencing one piece — or sequencing it wrong — can cascade into production outages. What infrastructure really needs is a separation of concerns, so complexity and dependencies can be untangled and then safely deployed. 3. The Risk and Compliance Gap Unlike application code, infrastructure changes gone wrong are risky. A single misstep can lead to downtime, security breaches or runaway cloud costs. AI agents don’t inherently understand an organization’s compliance obligations, cost thresholds or approval workflows. Without that context, autonomous deployment becomes a liability. That’s why teams may be OK with letting AI generate infrastructure code but stop short of letting it deploy that code. What AI Needs to Deploy Infrastructure Safely To close the gap, AI agents need three foundational elements: A controlled set of preapproved options, not infinite configuration possibilities. Clear dependency definitions to know what to deploy, in what order and under what conditions. Built-in guardrails to enforce cost, security and compliance policies automatically. In short: AI doesn’t need more intelligence; it needs structure, or blueprints That’s where the future of environment orchestration comes in. Environment Orchestration: Giving AI Agents the Context They Lack To do this, environment orchestration is needed. This approach takes raw infrastructure code and turns it into reusable and versioned blueprints that define how infrastructure can be safely created, modified and consumed. At the same time, it keeps a strict separation of concerns, enabling end-to-end automation across different IaC tools and maintaining standards. This results in the creation of standardized deployment packages that encode organizational rules and dependencies. At this point, AI agents aren’t writing Terraform on their own, nor are they creating deployment workflows. They also aren’t accessing “context” encoded in an internal developer portal. Instead, they access a catalog of “blueprints,” a fixed, immutable menu of options. Once that is selected, environment orchestration automatically: Builds a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of dependencies, Executes the correct deployment sequence. Enforces organizational policies, cost constraints and approval workflows. The result is safe, compliant and predictable infrastructure delivery, even when AI agents are in the loop. AI Agents Need A Catalog of Trusted Infrastructure This approach makes the catalog the single source of truth for how infrastructure gets deployed. It isn’t inferred by agents; it was prepared by the platform team. AI agents can query this catalog directly to understand: Which services and configurations are approved. What parameters and defaults are safe to use. How components depend on one another. So when a developer asks for a staging environment, the AI agent doesn’t have to guess. It selects a preapproved blueprint that includes the network, security groups, Kubernetes cluster, and database — all aligned with company policies. The AI agent is no longer exploring an infinite configuration space. It’s making validated choices within a controlled framework. Guardrails That Enforce Policies It’s important that everything in the catalog is also policy-aware. DevOps teams need to define standards once. Compliance is inherent to everything that’s in the catalog. That means: Cost controls are applied consistently. Security policies are built into each deployment. Compliance requirements are enforced by design. Each blueprint is version-controlled, so when an AI agent deploys version 2.3 of the database blueprint, you know exactly what’s being deployed — no surprises, no drift. Human-in-the-Loop by Design Not every deployment should be fully autonomous. You need to decide when to add human review. Perhaps this will be based on environment, blast radius, cost impact or compliance criticality, or you may want to apply human review in every case. This makes it possible to start with caution using human-reviewed deployments and gradually increase AI autonomy as trust builds. Where AI-Powered Infrastructure Shines Not every infrastructure task benefits from AI. But in certain scenarios, AI agents working with blueprints and guardrails can deliver transformative value. Elastic Scaling When monitoring tools detect increasing load, AI agents can use environment orchestration to scale infrastructure dynamically, choosing the optimal scaling method based on workload type, time patterns and cost efficiency. Need more compute for a CPU-bound job? Scale up. Handling bursty workloads? Scale out. Want to optimize for cost? Choose spot instances during off-peak hours. Because every scaling action uses a certified blueprint, the result is safe, compliant and fully auditable. Developer Self-Service AI-assisted self-service is another major win. Instead of waiting days for infrastructure tickets to clear, developers can request environments in natural language. They can ask AI to “spin up a staging cluster for the payment service” and have AI provision it instantly using preapproved blueprints. The experience feels autonomous, but the process remains compliant. Developers move faster, while platform teams keep full control. Speed, Safety and Smarter Resource Management AI-assisted infrastructure deployment delivers three major outcomes: Speed: The gap between feature creation and deployment narrows from days to minutes. Safety: Standardized blueprints ensure every deployment follows tested patterns and validated configurations. Smarts: AI agents make context-aware provisioning decisions while staying within organizational guardrails. Together, these capabilities redefine what’s possible for DevOps and platform teams — not as incremental efficiency gains, but as a fundamental shift in the way infrastructure is delivered. The Future: AI and DevOps Working in Harmony AI agents have already transformed the way developers write and review code. The next frontier is infrastructure, but to get there, AI needs more than generative power. It needs structure, context and guardrails. In this new model, platform and DevOps engineers become architects of standards, capturing institutional knowledge in blueprints. AI agents become reliable executors, deploying infrastructure that’s fast, compliant and business-aligned.
