# Kite: an open-source infrastructure-as-code language

Kite is Kitecorp's open-source infrastructure-as-code language, published at kitelang.cloud. Building it is how the team keeps its own infrastructure practice honest: every rough edge a client hits in Terraform or Ansible becomes a design question for Kite, and every answer Kite finds changes how we structure the other two.

Canonical: https://kitecorp.org/case-studies/kite-infrastructure-as-code-language
Updated: 2026-10-12

## What is Kite?

Kite is an open-source language for describing infrastructure, built by Kitecorp and published at [kitelang.cloud](https://kitelang.cloud) with its code in the [Kitecorp GitHub organisation](https://github.com/kitecorp). It sits beside Terraform and Ansible rather than replacing them: Terraform owns cloud resources, Ansible owns what happens inside machines, and Kite owns the parts of a system where its model of infrastructure reads more clearly than either.

## Why build another IaC language?

Because the problems we hit for clients repeat, and a language is the most honest place to record a solution. The same incidents recur across estates: inputs that live outside the repository, state that cannot be reasoned about per environment, modules whose interfaces drift from their callers, toggles that default to destruction. Each of those is a rule we enforce with sweeps and guards in Terraform today. Designing Kite forces the question of which of those rules should be impossible to break rather than merely checked, and the answers improve the way we write the other two tools even where Kite itself is not used.

## What does it change for clients?

Two things. The team that builds an infrastructure language reads client Terraform differently: it sees the places where a convention is doing the work a type system should, and it fixes the convention with a guard rather than a comment. And where Kite's model fits a client's system, it is available as a third tool with the same operating discipline: committed inputs, per-stack state, tests without live infrastructure. We say plainly where it does not fit, which is most estates today.

## Where is it going?

Towards the parts of infrastructure where the existing tools are weakest at expressing intent: the relationships between environments, the lifecycle of a secret, the difference between a resource that must exist and one that may. Kite is open source so that the reasoning is public and the rough edges are visible. There are no adoption figures to report; the measure for now is whether it changes how we build, and it does.

## How to start

Send a message at https://kitecorp.org/contact or email admin@kitelang.cloud. Pricing follows a discovery call.