Many media brands, one workflow

On cloud nine

Carter, Hopkins, and other senior team members like Senior Engineer Mike Saraf determined the team’s best course of action was to find a cost-effective, scalable, and easily maintained cloud infrastructure management tool the team could employ but not have to manage on their own.

“The reality is that cost is a big factor for us because we’re a consumer-based company who needs to keep operating costs low and manage to our margins wherever possible,” Carter says. “As long-time Terraform users, upgrading to Terraform Cloud made a lot of sense because we could offload the responsibility of having to run and manage different platforms and services ourselves without sacrificing the consistency and efficiency we’d built over the years with Terraform.”

Terraform Cloud is a subscription-based SaaS version of Terraform that provides Red Ventures engineers and developers everything they need to create and collaborate on infrastructure and manage risks for security, compliance, and operational constraints. The platform’s built-in single sign-on (SSO) capabilities replaces costly corporate identity management while maintaining the security and integrity of essential systems.

More importantly, this cloud-agnostic service helps to dramatically accelerate provisioning of essential infrastructure — containers, cloud servers, or other resources — by leveraging the team’s own internal library of Terraform templates based on common patterns and featuring a range of helpful documentation to launch new infrastructure in AWS in a fraction of the time.

“The Terraform templates make it easy to spin up any new container or resource for any team by just feeding the values for the infrastructure so the engineer doesn’t have to figure it out, while still giving them the flexibility to configure things individually to meet the specific needs of their brand,” Hopkins notes. “At the same time, upgrading to the cloud version provides engineers end-to-end visibility into how their environment will look and proactively troubleshoot without having to wait on a team lead to review it.”

Multi-cloud capabilities for a multi-cloud future

According to Carter, adopting Terraform Cloud has been a transformative experience for his organization, both operationally and financially. “Terraform Cloud has helped us create a true self-service operation across our organization,” he says. “Modules that used to take us a week to set up internally can now be handled independently by teams in the different business units, which has improved our resource allocation, license management, and other cost factors that have cumulatively saved us more than $20,000 per month across the board.”

In addition to the cost savings, the upgrade to Terraform Cloud has also dramatically boosted the organization’s productivity. Hopkins notes that, to date, the organization has successfully launched more than 400,000 runs, automatically setting up infrastructure across nearly 1,500 workspaces to support more than 300 teams across the enterprise.

In the future, Carter expects their move to a hosted, multi-cloud provisioning solution to pay even bigger dividends, as the company expands beyond its current AWS-heavy environment. “We’ve been primarily an AWS shop for a while, but the momentum toward a multi-cloud environment is unstoppable and the reality is that our environment will have to expand as the business grows,” he says. “HashiCorp solutions have been a foundational element of our success to this point and Terraform Cloud will certainly be a crucial part of our ability to thrive in the future.”