As cloud complexity continues to escalate, visibility becomes a top challenge
Tags: devops, aws, iac
Published: 2024-02-28 18:42:27

A [survey](https://www.firefly.ai/state-of-iac-2024) of over 350 cloud users conducted by [Firefly](firefly.ai), a provider of a platform for automating cloud provisioning, found that as cloud complexity continues to escalate, the use of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has become a de facto standard; as it is boosted by AI and GenAI for policy creation and remediation advice.
Let's drill in to understand the drivers, common approaches,
trends, and outcomes revealed in this survey.

**Setting some common ground**
We noticed some common trends and challenges that companies are seeing in their use of multi-cloud and IaC.

Multi-cloud remains the norm with a growing number of accounts 
![Use of multiple cloud accounts continues to be a growing trend](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/m31g8of233jbsoa8qfst.png)

Companies face common issues in their use of IaC:

- Manual labor

- Shortage in qualified talent

- Configuration drifts

- Fragmented tools

Average respondent is using many more IaC frameworks this year than last year. 57% use 2 or more frameworks, the ones using 5 or 6 different IaC frameworks is much higher than last year.

Nearly 60% of the current Terraform users surveyed plan to abandon it. This is no surprise with 56% of respondents noting that the Terraform license change was disruptive to them.


![IaC frameworks are undergoing a shift](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4kwsavb0b3zhsme9ywhf.png)

**How much is codified as IaC?**
The majority of respondents have already made the shift to codifying their clouds, with more than 64% of respondents noting that they have codified more than half of their cloud assets. 

When it comes to codifying SaaS application configurations like Okta, DataDog, and the like, more than ¾ of respondents are managing or planning to manage SaaS configurations using IaC.

This continued trend to manage everything as code provides greater security, disaster recovery, and more powerful automation capabilities

![Everything as Code](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/gy2dp4ky8rzftw66z2i3.png)

**As cloud complexity escalates, visibility becomes a critical challenge**
Security displaced governance/change management this year as a top challenge while visibility/multi-cloud remains a key concern. It makes sense that you can’t manage what you can’t see and manage.

![The top challenges to managing cloud infrastructure](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tbples4mqmr75lljh0k4.png)

40% of respondents said they cannot detect configuration drift at all, yet this is a marked improvement over last year’s 61%. 
40% are spending days to weeks to remediate the drift. This includes everything from misconfigurations that can put systems at risk, to patching application software. While drift detection has improved year-over-year, remediation has not. At least 20% do not detect drift at all, and 13% do not fix it.  


![Drift detection methods](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/g54x3lxnx758ftkjk193.png)

**Progress remains difficult but AI holds promise**
As cloud complexity continues to escalate, challenges of visibility and governance will continue to compound. 

Platforms that can help cloud operations manage across cloud providers and across multiple IaC frameworks are becoming mission critical in order to provide visibility and consistency for organizations embracing cloud-native infrastructure.

AI can be used to manage your multi-cloud infrastructure - from code generation to policy enforcement, anomaly detection, remediation and even CloudOps. For example, Firedly's customers are using our built-in Policy as Code generator to write custom policies like asset tagging and more.

Download your copy [here](https://www.firefly.ai/state-of-iac-2024)