.png)
Have you ever watched a “temporary” Infrastructure as Code script quietly become mission-critical, undocumented, and owned by someone who left the company two years ago? We can all related to a similar scenario, if not infrastructure-specific, and this is usually the moment teams realise the build vs buy IaC decision was made by accident, not design.
As your teams grow from managing a handful of environments to orchestrating hundreds of workspaces across multiple clouds, the limits of homegrown IaC pipeline management show up fast. It starts as a few shell scripts wrapping OpenTofu or Terraform commands often evolves into a fragile web of CI jobs, custom glue code, and tribal knowledge that no one feels confident changing.
The real question is not whether you can build your own IaC solution. Most teams can. The question is what it costs you in velocity, governance, and reliability once the platform becomes business-critical.
The Appeal and Cost of Custom IaC Pipelines
Building a custom IaC solution feels empowering at first. You control every detail. You understand exactly how plan and apply flows work. You can tailor pipelines to your team’s preferences without waiting on vendors or abstractions.
For small teams with simple requirements, this works. A basic OpenTofu or Terraform pipeline in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI can handle plan-on-pull-request and apply-on-merge patterns just fine. Add a manual approval step and a notification, and you are operational.
The problem is that infrastructure rarely stays simple.
As usage grows, the cracks start to appear:
- Governance gaps: Who is allowed to apply changes to production? How are policies enforced consistently? What happens when someone bypasses the pipeline and runs apply locally?
- State and workspace sprawl: Managing dozens or hundreds of state files, backend configurations, and locking behaviour becomes a coordination problem, not a scripting one.
- Workflow inconsistency: Each team builds its own version of “the pipeline.” What starts as flexibility turns into a support burden when every repository behaves differently.
- Security and audit blind spots: Secrets handling, access controls, audit trails, and drift detection are rarely first-class concerns in homegrown tooling. They become reactive fixes after something goes wrong.
At this point, the build vs buy IaC question stops being technical and becomes strategic.
What an IaCM Platform Is Actually Solving
We cannot simply label our infrastructure as code management platform as “CI for Terraform.” It exists to standardise how infrastructure changes are proposed, reviewed, approved, and applied across teams.
Instead of every team reinventing the same patterns, an IaCM platform provides shared primitives that scale.
Consistent Workspace Lifecycles
Workspaces are treated as first-class entities. Plans, approvals, applies, and execution history are visible in one place. When something fails, you do not have to reconstruct context from CI logs and commit messages.
Enforced IaC Governance
IaC governance stops being a best-practice document and becomes part of the workflow. Policy checks run automatically. Risky changes are surfaced early. Approval gates are applied consistently based on impact, not convention.
This matters regardless of whether teams are using OpenTofu as their open-source baseline or maintaining existing Terraform pipelines.
Centralised Variables and Secrets
Managing environment-specific configuration across large numbers of workspaces is one of the fastest ways to introduce mistakes. IaCM platforms provide variable sets and secure secret handling so values are managed once and applied consistently.
Drift Detection Without Custom Glue
Infrastructure drift is inevitable. Manual console changes, provider behaviour, and external automation all contribute. An IaCM platform detects drift continuously and surfaces it clearly, without relying on scheduled scripts parsing CLI output.
Module and Provider Governance
Reusable modules are essential for scaling IaC, but unmanaged reuse creates risk. A built-in module and provider registry ensures teams use approved, versioned components and reduces duplication across the organisation.
Why Building This Yourself Rarely Scales
Most platform teams underestimate how much work lives beyond the initial pipeline.
You will eventually need:
- Role-based access control.
- Approval workflows that vary by environment.
- Audit logs that satisfy compliance reviews.
- Concurrency controls and workspace locking.
- Safe ways to evolve pipelines without breaking dozens of teams.
None of these are hard in isolation. Together, they represent a long-term maintenance commitment. Unless building IaC tooling is your product, this effort rarely delivers competitive advantage.
How Harness IaCM Changes the Build vs Buy Equation
Harness Infrastructure as Code Management (IaCM) is designed for teams that want control without rebuilding the same platform components over and over again.
It supports both OpenTofu and Terraform, allowing teams to standardise workflows even as tooling evolves. OpenTofu fits naturally as an open-source execution baseline for new workloads, while Terraform remains supported where existing investment makes sense.
Harness IaCM provides:
- Default plan and apply pipelines that work out of the box.
- Workspace templates to enforce consistent backend configuration and governance.
- Module and provider registries to manage reuse safely.
- Policy enforcement, security checks, and cost visibility built directly into every run.
Instead of writing and maintaining custom orchestration logic, teams focus on infrastructure design and delivery.
Drift detection, approvals, and audit trails are handled consistently across every workspace, without bespoke scripts or CI hacks.
Making a Deliberate Build vs Buy IaC Decision
The build vs buy IaC decision should be intentional, not accidental.
If your organisation has a genuine need to own every layer of its tooling and the capacity to maintain it long-term, building can be justified. For most teams, however, the operational overhead outweighs the benefits.
An IaCM platform provides faster time-to-value, stronger governance, and fewer failure modes as infrastructure scales.
Harness Infrastructure as Code Management enables teams to operationalise best practices for OpenTofu and Terraform without locking themselves into brittle, homegrown solutions.
The real question is not whether you can build this yourself. It is whether you want to be maintaining it when the platform becomes critical.
Explore Harness IaCM and move beyond fragile IaC pipelines.
All this author’s posts
I’m a Staff Developer Relations Engineer at Harness, where I drive documentation initiatives and set standards that make complex concepts easier to adopt. My focus areas are Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Artifact Registry, where I create clear, interactive content to support developers in their workflows. I’m passionate about bridging the gap between engineering and communication, helping teams move faster with confidence.
