An annual pulse check on the evolving state of IaC maturity and impact in the age of AI agents
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We surveyed hundreds of infrastructure professionals to find out how prepared teams are, in a reality where:
AI agents can now write and execute Terraform. They can provision environments, reconfigure stacks, and (as one engineer learned the hard way) run terraform destroy on a production cloud with nothing to stop them.
Here’s what we learned.
Here’s what we learned.
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DR confidence is highly desired, but rarely achieved
Over 30% of practitioners have little to no confidence they could restore within RTO, despite ranking 'infrastructure immutability and rebuild confidence' as the #1 benefit of IaC in 2026.
IaC orchestration needs serious work, especially at scale
90% agree their orchestration falls short. At scale, it becomes even more challenging. Only 8% have no notable IaC scaling issues.
Drift is a major incident driver and most teams aren't ready for it
1/3 of respondents tied drift to a costly production incident.
A worrying 8% even caused significant downtime. Yet nearly 20% have no detection or remediation processes at all.
A worrying 8% even caused significant downtime. Yet nearly 20% have no detection or remediation processes at all.
AI is already embedded in the IaC lifecycle, but governance hasn't caught up
44% are in production or pilots with AI for infrastructure automation. Yet only 34% would trust AI agents to make autonomous production changes, and 42% cite the absence of guardrails as their #1 blocker.
Advanced automation maturity is still rare
Just 5% have reached fully self-healing systems, but the direction of travel is clear: granular approval workflows and natural language IaC top the wishlist for what comes next.
In the coming year, expect to see:
AI governance frameworks become non-negotiable
As agents move into production infrastructure workflows, blast radius limits, approval gates, and audit trails will shift from ‘nice to have’ to minimum viable infrastructure practice. Teams without a dedicated control plane will face mounting risk.
The codification gap close, with AI doing the heavy lifting
Auto-generating IaC from existing cloud resources is the most-wanted AI capability for a reason. Expect tooling in this space to mature rapidly, with the biggest gains going to teams that pair codification automation with drift detection.
DR testing become a compliance expectation
With infrastructure immutability ranking as the top IaC benefit and DR confidence lagging badly, expect internal and external pressure to formalize DR validation, especially in regulated industries.
Dedicated IaC platforms become the standard for AI-era infrastructure
General-purpose CI/CD pipelines weren’t built to govern AI agents. The teams investing in dedicated control planes now are building the infrastructure they’ll need to operate safely as agentic workflows become the norm.