Lighting the way forward

Single source of truth for delivering a greener future

The roll-out of the smart meters marked the beginning of a new era where the utilities had to handle, and benefit from, large amounts of sensor data that hadn’t existed previously. This sparked the need for a new breed of solutions; they began developing in-house then started incorporating HashiCorp Terraform and Vault as integral parts of their development framework.

Elvia adopted Terraform and Vault for a simpler, more efficient, and cost-effective way of merging a range of core systems and integrating data transport workflows from its burgeoning smart meter deployments.

“We looked at a number of other possible solutions, but couldn’t find any with the cross-platform capabilities or flexibility HashiCorp solutions offered,” Heitmann explains. “Add to it the fact that we can consolidate all of our disparate legacy systems into a single platform and single source of truth while separating service and secrets management on our various clouds, and it was really a simple decision.”

With Terraform, Elvia engineers leverage templates to enable developers from both legacy organizations to write, share, manage, and automate any infrastructure across AWS, Google Cloud, and on-premises systems. This lets them rapidly deploy infrastructure to support everything from smart meter data transport and analytics to automating core transformer operations and health checks across the combined company’s grid.

“HashiCorp Terraform comes with great documentation and super helpful forums that make it easy for everyone on both companies’ teams to learn the new syntax pretty quickly and hit the ground running,” says Marius Matonis, Elvia’s technical lead. “We’ve used the modules and templates to build nearly 40 different systems and runtime environments in GitHub, Azure, GCP, and others across nearly 200 different workspaces up to three days faster per instance than we could have in the past.”

While the SaaS-based Terraform Cloud has helped the company sunset many of the overprovisioned and idle virtual machines to potentially save tens of thousands of dollars in operating spend each year, Vault has similarly simplified the company’s secrets management operations to help further accelerate the organization’s transformation.

“In the past, we’d used some of the built-in secrets management tools from our cloud providers, but Vault is a much more elegant, simple, and stable solution for our needs,” Matonis states. “We can even use Terraform to set up Vault clusters, so we no longer have to worry about manually creating, distributing, and managing access keys to core systems and services. It’s automated and frees us up to focus on continuous integration and deployment priorities and really push our initiatives forward.”

Though the company’s transformation is still in its infancy, Heitmann and Matonis agree that HashiCorp solutions have played an instrumental role in the organization’s success to this point, and expect that the enhanced automation, streamlined operations, and standardized processes will enable the company to achieve its business goals sooner than later.

“Prior to building a platform entirely defined in code, we had no automation, no visibility, and really no idea how to take on such a massive change,” Heitmann says. “Terraform and Vault are the foundations of a modern IT platform that will help bring our century-old company into the modern era and fully allow us to both solidify the underlying infrastructure for reliably delivering power to people across our country while also embracing the environmentally friendly technologies that will help us do it more efficiently and responsibly.”