Enterprise platform engineering teams have to face increasing infrastructure scale and delivery velocity needs, particularly in the era of generative AI. Companies in regulated industries are tasked to enable developer velocity without compromising security, governance, or auditing capabilities.
Many organizations have selected Terraform as their preferred Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool. While HCP Terraform Cloud has established itself as a leading solution in the past for enabling teams to use Terraform together, forward-thinking organizations are discovering that next-generation platforms like StackGuardian could be more appealing due to their support for multiple IaC tools, focus on innovation, security, compliance-first approach, and a pricing model that makes sense.
This analysis explores how StackGuardian addresses the evolving needs of enterprise platform engineering teams on automation, governance, and cost optimization capabilities that extend far beyond traditional Terraform management. Stackguardian provides the foundation that helps embed governance, security, and compliance directly into developer workflows through an IaC self-service platform.
HCP Terraform’s (previously Terraform Cloud) recent transition to a Resource Under Management (RUM) pricing model has prompted many organizations to reconsider their infrastructure automation strategy. The RUM pricing model calculates costs based on the number of cloud resources managed by Terraform.
The shift from per-user to per-resource billing creates significant cost implications for organizations managing thousands of resources, potentially incurring costs of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for their IaC needs. Even worse, this pricing model often goes against cloud infrastructure best practices, as it demotivates users from creating necessary resources at scale that are usually free themselves, such as IAM policies and security groups, but now are priced in HCP Terraform Cloud. It’s clear that the HCP Terraform pricing model effectively creates disincentives for platform engineering best practices.
Even more, HashiCorp's switch to Business Source License (BSL) v1.1 in August 2023 has created vendor lock-in concerns. Organizations worry about future licensing changes and restrictions. This has accelerated the adoption of OpenTofu, the open-source fork that maintains MPL 2.0 licensing. OpenTofu has gained significant traction with multiple corporate backers and 26,000+ GitHub stars since its 2023 launch. The Linux Foundation backing provides governance stability that appeals to enterprise users concerned about single-vendor control.
Beyond pricing and strategic vendor-lock-in concerns, enterprises are seeking platforms that offer more comprehensive platform engineering capabilities, better support for self-service infrastructure, and enhanced governance frameworks extending beyond simple Terraform workflows. Organizations often leverage multiple technologies such as Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible, Helm, and Kubernetes want to benefit from unified management across multiple IaC tools and cross-platform workflow standardization.
What began as simple configuration management has evolved over the years into what we now call platform engineering. Such practices often involve complex multi-cloud and hybrid orchestration that spans public clouds and on-premises environments. Having everything under IaC management with Terraform is no longer sufficient.
StackGuardian’s unified infrastructure orchestration platform represents a paradigm shift from traditional IaC management to comprehensive infrastructure orchestration. With a single interface for managing infrastructure across all environments and AI-powered optimization and predictive analytics, it offers a centralized control plane for your infrastructure needs.
StackGuardian is specifically designed for platform engineering teams in regulated environments who need to implement golden paths, shift-left compliance, and multi-cloud orchestration while closing critical compliance gaps.
Due to the rapid pace of innovation and the continuously increasing infrastructure needs of product teams, self-service capabilities are now deemed essential. At the same time, automated compliance, security enforcement at scale, and cost intelligence baked into the infrastructure flows have become the new bar.
StackGuardian’s pricing model offers several distinct advantages that simplify cost management and promote scalability:
Check out StackGuardian Pricing to learn more.
StackGuardian performs over 1,800 automated checks across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments, providing actionable insights into cost optimization, security misconfigurations, and compliance violations. This comprehensive discovery capability is the starting point for a compliant infrastructure. First, it enables visualising the current shortcomings and misconfigurations. Second, allows choosing from the recommended preventive policies to be activated, and finally, enforcing these on any new deployments across the organisation. It effectively makes it easy to do the right things and very hard to do the wrong things.
DevSecOps for regulated industries requires embedding security and compliance controls throughout the software development lifecycle. The platform enables the creation of IaC blueprints with embedded governance policies. To innovate quickly while maintaining proper guardrails, built-in governance frameworks can scale with your organization through no-code policy options, easy-to-use policy-as-code integrations, and pre-built infrastructure templates listed on SGMarketplace for quick onboarding. This allows organizations to effectively shift left their security practices and embed them into IaC workflows.
StackGuardian emphasizes self-service infrastructure, enabling developers to deploy compliant infrastructure without deep infrastructure expertise. This developer-centric approach addresses the platform engineering goal of empowering development teams while maintaining operational control.
StackGuardian supports multiple IaC tools, including Terraform, OpenTofu, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Helm, Kubernetes, and Ansible. Moreover, custom workflows enable customers to bring their own runtime to the platform through containers, supporting virtually any automation tool available. This multi-tool approach, which allows the orchestration of complete infrastructure workflows, contrasts with HCP's Terraform-focused ecosystem, offering greater flexibility for organizations with diverse IaC requirements.
Golden paths in StackGuardian enable developers to provision compliant infrastructure across multiple clouds using consistent interfaces while platform teams enforce unified security baselines. This capability is critical, for example, for financial services organizations subject to DORA requirements, which mandate resilience across multiple cloud providers and regions.
The platform integrates AI for intelligent policy generation, predictive analytics, and automated optimization recommendations, powering its next-generation infrastructure platform. Instead of manually creating templates, AI can analyze existing patterns and generate optimized configurations that follow established governance policies. StackGuardian's self-service model benefits significantly from AI integration. The platform's framework provides the foundation for AI-driven and NoCode policy development, while intelligent interfaces can simplify the developer experience without compromising security or compliance.
StackGuardian represents the evolution of infrastructure automation platforms from traditional "Terraform-as-a-Service" offerings toward comprehensive platform engineering solutions. Its emphasis on self-service capabilities, multi-tool support, and AI-enhanced automation addresses the growing complexity of enterprise infrastructure management.
StackGuardian delivers maximum value to organizations operating in heavily regulated industries, particularly those requiring multi-cloud or multi-IaC orchestration, facing compliance gaps or audit findings, and those managing large infrastructure estates.
For organizations committed to platform engineering principles and seeking alternatives to HCP Terraform's resource-based pricing model, StackGuardian offers a compelling path forward. The platform's recent funding and enterprise customer adoption by organizations like Siemens, RheinEnergie, and Bpost demonstrate its increasing traction in the platform engineering field.
StackGuardian's platform provides the foundation for implementing next-generation cloud infrastructure platforms. Book a demo today!
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HCP Terraform Cloud Alternative: How StackGuardian Delivers Next-Gen Infrastructure Orchestration
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Traditional approaches often fall short when organizations scale beyond simple deployments. Can artificial intelligence (AI) and agentic implementations bridge this gap?
In highly regulated industries, maintaining GxP (Good Practices) compliance is critical.
Terraform is one of the most popular tools for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Let's understand Terraform State.
Data breaches and misconfigurations can have serious consequences. Cloud security should be a top concern for every organization.
In the last decade, organizations chased the DevOps dream, drowning themselves in complexity and cognitive overload. Outcome-Driven Approaches Redefine DevOps and Platform Engineering Success
Infrastructure as Code Best Practices & Implementation – transforming brittle, manual processes into repeatable blueprints for modern cloud operations.
Imagine, a test environment closely matching production is automatically created for them. Developers don’t have to open a request and wait hours or days. This is the promise of self-service infrastructure!
In today's fast-paced tech environment, developer productivity isn't just about writing code faster; it's about creating a workflow that allows developers to focus on innovation while maintaining efficiency, security, and compliance.
Organisations today have a variety of approaches to managing software development and infrastructure operations. Three common models are DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). While there are some similarities, each has distinct goals, responsibilities, and practices.
The most common traditional security framework is the CIA triad, Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information is crucial to the operation of a business, and the CIA triad segments these three ideas into separate focal points. This differentiation is helpful because it helps guide security teams as they pinpoint the different ways in which they can address each concern.
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