Lending a helping hand

Fast, flexible, and scalable infrastructure deployment Working fully remotely for the first time and under increasing pressure to complete a core component of the bank’s digital transformation efforts, Lozada’s ADB team focused on ways to accelerate provisioning its Day Zero datacenter infrastructure.

Given the team’s positive experience with HashiCorp Vault and Consul for its secrets engine, Lozada says that staying within the HashiCorp ecosystem with HashiCorp Terraform made the most sense because its common user experience and simple, English-like HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) didn’t require special skills or a long learning curve.

“Our network team doesn’t write scripts and our Linux and Windows teams usually just work in their own languages on their own projects,” she explains.“Terraform’s HCL is the simplest way of getting everyone speaking the same language and pulling in the same direction toward our common business goal.”

That common business goal — building out the cloud infrastructure for a new datacenter as quickly as possible— featured some uncommon strategies. Specifically, ADB uses Terraform alongside its existing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, using the HashiCorp software to build out the initial infrastructure and ADB’s other tools to handle everything that comes afterward.

“People generally just want to use one platform instead of multiple ones, but we saw it a bit differently,” Lozada explains. “If we were creating a new restaurant, Terraform would be the one actually building the facility. Our other tools would be the chef who creates the menu and serves the customers.”

Lozada’s team built out its entire datacenter’s cloud infrastructure using Terraform open source and Microsoft Azure DevOps Server, which provides developer services for teams to plan work, collaborate on code development, and build and deploy applications. The team subsequently used Terraform OSS and Azure DevOps to put in place its Terraform Enterprise instance. They then used that instance of Terraform Enterprise as the automation engine to complete the whole virtual datacenter build.

With Terraform, ADB can automate the provisioning of all its cloud infrastructure in Microsoft Azure with no manual intervention or the need for user access. The solution features infrastructure automation workflows for building composition, collaboration, and reusing infrastructure as code while providing standardization for security, compliance, and management.

While it might have been faster to do the first iterations manually, infrastructure as code gave the bank the flexibility to change on demand. “By writing every single change as code, we have the latest source of truth — or the latest configuration in place — as a blueprint in our code,” Lozada says. “The team loves putting everything in as code so much that users have only read access to the bank’s cloud infrastructure. If you need to change any infrastructure, you change it at the code level. “ Parallel processes for rapid build-out Lozada says that using Terraform — along with complementary HashiCorp solutions like Packer and Consul — helped the ADB team accomplish what, at one time, seemed impossible. “One of the biggest challenges we faced was building everything in parallel because the statuses of other aspects of the datacenter build-out changed every week,” she says. “With Terraform, we can make changes or spin up new infrastructure with just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. If we’d done it manually and sequentially like most processes, it would have taken at least 45 days for our part of the build to be ready.”

Lozada says that deploying every component of their cloud infrastructure — from spinning up new virtual machines and configuring more than 2,000 items in the datacenter to completing a whole new data warehouse — takes a fraction of the time and effort as standard methods.

“Spinning up a new virtual machine used to take two or three days each, but now takes just a few minutes,” she says. “More importantly, with Terraform we can virtually guarantee compliance with data governance standards and meet the demands for systems availability simply by standardizing our processes across the board and reusing the code we’d built in Azure.”

With its DR site fully built out, and the code base available should the bank decide to add more failover options to its footprint in the future, Asian Development Bank is well positioned to continue lending its support to underserved populations across the region. “We play such an important role in the lives of people throughout Asia, and modernizing our IT infrastructure is vital to continuing our mission. Terraform and the support from the HashiCorp team have been instrumental in our transformation.”