A unified plan for secrets

From many, one

Following internal discussions, the Anaplan team determined that the simplest pinch point to address was its secrets management practices, aiming to consolidate secrets operations onto a single solution. The team evaluated a number of third-party solutions and even developed its own homegrown solution for secrets but chose HashiCorp Vault’s integrated storage for its cloud-native approach and how well it fit with Anaplan's overall platform strategy and direction.

With Vault integrated storage, Anaplan can access a range of features and capabilities that create an efficient, agile, and cost-effective model for managing mission-critical data. Now the information Anaplan had previously stored elsewhere is placed on Vault servers.

More importantly, Vault integrated storage eliminates the need to set-up, manage, and monitor a third-party storage system, minimizing the amount of manual configuration the team had to execute while providing better network performance by eliminating additional network hops.

Unlike other backend storage, Vault integrated storage writes updates to the disk which frees Vault's dataset from the limitations of the amount of RAM on the host. Since it doesn’t operate from a single source of data, the Vault solution instead replicates copies of its data across all the nodes in a Vault cluster via the Raft Consensus Algorithm. Though writing directly to disk is usually a slower process than saving it to an in-memory database, it also reduces the operational burden on Menges’s team by reducing the IT footprint and helping to lower infrastructure costs.

"Using Vault integrated storage has helped us reduce the number of different clusters we had to manage by nearly half and completely eliminated many of the frontend resources we used to commit to Vault,” says Menges. “More importantly, we’re spending almost 50% less time on deployments, maintaining the images, and coordinating operating systems because we’re no longer dedicating a team to manage separate platforms. All of those policies and deployments can be automated now with Terraform, freeing our team to focus on higher-value activities.”

Time is money

According to Menges, Vault integrated storage has been a transformative force for Anaplan’s business. “One of the biggest benefits of switching to Vault integrated storage is how many fewer resources we have to watch and manage. There are half as many audit logs, dashboards, VMs, and saved images from AWS or Google to contend with,” he says. “Everything we used to have to do twice with multiple systems can now be done just once with Vault integrated storage.”

Beyond reducing the time burden on his team, Menges says that the migration has also had important fiscal benefits to the team and company too. Specifically, it’s helped the company save as much as 30% on its per-instance costs, scale down its secrets management clusters from eight VMs to five VMs each, while also eliminating costly storage network traffic and the constant traffic exchanges between systems, potentially saving thousands of dollars per year on traffic costs alone.

Still, Menges says that while the time and cost savings have been huge accomplishments for the team and company at large, the existing relationship with HashiCorp is the key to long-term success and sustainable improvements.

“We’ve maintained a great relationship with HashiCorp, so we’re comfortable making feature requests and having regular candid discussions about what's possible versus what's recommended,” he notes. “Even though we adopted some features earlier than most, there’s always more to learn, more to consider, and more to do. It’s important to have a trustworthy partner to help figure it all out and continue to push us closer to our ideal business and operational state.”