Exclusive insights from StackGen Cofounder, CTO Asif Awan on revolutionizing cloud infrastructure management, DevOps automation, and the future of Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
🎧 Listen to the full episode: Generative Infrastructure: How StackGen is Simplifying Cloud Development
Highlights: Infrastructure as Code, DevOps automation, cloud development, Terraform, Kubernetes, AI infrastructure, multi-cloud deployment, developer experience
In a fascinating conversation on "What's Up with Tech?" with the host Evan Kirstel, StackGen Co founder and CTO, Asif Awan pulled back the curtain on what might be the next major evolution in cloud infrastructure management and tackling one of the most persistent pain points in modern software development: the complexity of infrastructure as code.
"There's a lot of time that the developers spend trying to learn and deal with infrastructure as code such as Terraform and Helm," Awan explains to host Evan Kirstel. "Primarily, those are the two most popular ones for the workloads that get deployed in the Cloud or for Cloud applications."
But it's not just developers who are struggling. As Awan points out, "Then there is the other side of the DevOps engineers having to deal with maintaining the templates."
This dual burden—developers forced to become infrastructure experts and DevOps teams drowning in template maintenance—is precisely what StackGen's "Generative Infrastructure Platform" aims to solve.
Understanding Application Intent
Rather than forcing developers to master complex infrastructure tools, StackGen takes a radically different approach. "We are taking a completely different approach to addressing the issues around infrastructure as code," Awan reveals.
The platform works by "starting with understanding the intent of the application or the application developer." Awan provides a concrete example:
"Let's say I've written a cloud application, a container-native, Kubernetes-native cloud application, and that has dependency on a few cloud platform resources. Let's take the example of AWS. My application could be dependent on RDS, relational database, as well as on a storage bucket, S3 storage bucket."
StackGen can understand this intent in two powerful ways:
Automated Infrastructure from Code Analysis "Either you can understand that intent directly from the code, which is something that is referred to as infrastructure from code, which StackGen also supports, directly from the code. The developer doesn't even have to explicitly mention anything. What we do is we just go through, do the static code analysis, and then of the application code and the corresponding configuration files, and we figured out that, hey, there is a dependency on these two resources."
Visual Cloud Infrastructure Design "The other way to understand the intent is where the developer, what we provide as an Infra Composer or a Canvas, where the developer can just drag and drop the resources, connect them to the compute module, and just visually not having to do anything or learn anything about the Terraform code or the infrastructure as code, just be able to generate the infrastructure."
When Kirstel asks about StackGen's use of AI, Awan reveals a crucial distinction that sets their platform apart from traditional copilot solutions:
"We are taking what I refer to as a two-step approach, or a two-rule approach to using agentic AI for a generative infrastructure as code," Awan explains.
Deterministic Terraform Generation for Developers "Let's say I'm a software developer who doesn't know anything about Terraform. So majority of solutions that are out there, what they do is they just say, hey, there's a copilot, it can generate Terraform for you. But how useful is that generated Terraform for me? Because I have to review it and make sure that there aren't any due to hallucinations or there aren't any mistakes. If I'm clueless about Terraform, that doesn't help me at all."
StackGen's solution? "For users who do not understand infrastructure as code, we just give them a very deterministic way... You don't ever have to look at or review or verify that the generated code is correct."
AI-Assisted Terraform Module Creation for DevOps Teams "For the experts such as DevOps engineers who are used to writing, crafting, and maintaining Terraform templates and so on, what we do is we give them a generative AI based approach where they can create complex Terraform modules. We recently launched something called a Terraform Module Editor. Using which the expert DevOps engineers can just go ahead, create the Terraform code, but just through prompts."
Awan's philosophy on developer experience is refreshingly practical. "The feedback has been fantastic," he notes, explaining their dual approach:
"The first thing is meet the developers where they are. That is the number one. The second thing is... don't ask them to learn anything that they do not want to learn, which is make the developers just do what they're good at doing, which is basically coding the application or the business logic."
Backstage Integration for Internal Developer Platforms "The way we do the first part is meeting the developers where they are, is through integration with internal developer platform or portal such as Backstage. We recently launched an integration... If any large enterprise has rolled out internal developer portal as a developer within that enterprise, I would not even know the existence of StackGen. StackGen will be enabling all of those capabilities that I've been talking about through Backstage."
When Kirstel asks about security and compliance—those critical requirements that developers often see as obstacles—Awan reveals how StackGen makes them invisible:
"What we focus on... is enable the developers while empowering the DevOps teams," Awan explains. "All they have to do is just go ahead and define or select that, hey, these application that Evan's team is building, they need to be HIPAA compliant or FedRAMP compliant. That is all they have to do. They just have to select the framework, and based on that framework that they have selected, and any other custom policies that are defined, StackGen platform will automatically and in a fully compliant way enforce it on every application that is being developed by Evan's team."
The conversation reveals StackGen's remarkable growth trajectory. "This has been a breakthrough year for us, Evan," Awan shares enthusiastically. "We have signed a lot of big marquee enterprise customers, NBA, Nielsen, Lexmark, SAP, Autodesk, just to name a few. We have doubled the team size."
Awan outlines three primary ways their enterprise customers are finding value:
"Now that we have all of these building blocks, we are doubling down. In fact, now we have a dedicated team that is working on building that AI control plane and the agenting AI workflows," Awan reveals, showing how the company is methodically building toward their autonomous infrastructure vision.
This conversation reveals more than just another infrastructure automation tool—it showcases a fundamental rethinking of how cloud development and DevOps should work. By removing the artificial barrier between application development and infrastructure management, StackGen's generative infrastructure platform is enabling teams to focus on what actually creates business value.
For organizations struggling with Terraform complexity, multi-cloud deployment challenges, or simply wanting to improve developer productivity, StackGen's approach offers a compelling glimpse into a more intelligent, automated future.
The shift toward generative infrastructure represents the next evolution in DevOps automation—where infrastructure truly becomes invisible to developers while remaining fully controllable by platform engineering teams.
🎧 Listen to the Complete Podcast Episode:
Generative Infrastructure: How StackGen is Simplifying Cloud Development on "What's Up with Tech?" with Evan Kirstel.
📈 Explore StackGen Solutions:
Infrastructure Design Studio
This blog post highlights key insights from a 20-minute conversation packed with technical depth and strategic vision about the future of cloud infrastructure automation. The full podcast episode contains additional details about StackGen's AI technology, enterprise customer success stories, and detailed roadmap for autonomous infrastructure.
Further Read: Alteryx CTO DV Lamba on Why AI Will Create Chaos in Software Development