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In choosing to migrate to GCP, Simpli.fi needed a reliable cloud infrastructure development solution to help recapture customer confidence and bolster its growth efforts. The solution also had to offer containerized workloads in order to run applications in a more lightweight and efficient way, as well as support multi-region deployments to minimize latency, improve performance, and reduce the risk of downtime.

Simpli.fi adopted HashiCorp Terraform to deploy its infrastructure as code. Unlike its bare metal environment where provisioning resources could take days or weeks, Terraform empowers Simpli.fi’s platform team to easily spin up and tear down resources in the cloud, making changes to infrastructure quickly and easily.

Terraform eliminates redundant manual coding that makes mass cloud migration time- and resource-intensive. “The reusable components in Terraform help us save time, money, and a lot of infrastructure-related headaches we used to deal with every day,” Scott explains. “It also helped us ensure that our governance policies and security controls are consistently applied across the cloud infrastructure without having to add overhead or more work for our team.”

Scott says he views containerization as a game-changer for deploying and scaling services and spinning up new containers on demand. “Being able to easily and quickly respond to changes in customer demand or traffic spikes is essential to delivering the quality and predictable service our customers expect,” he says. “Having the capacity to isolate applications from each other to improve security and reduce the risk of system failures helps us focus on serving our customers and innovating new services instead of constantly worrying that something’s about to break. It’s really what brought us to HashiCorp’s stack in the first place.”

Zeroing in on migration and containerization targets

Cloud migrations on the scale of Simpli.fi’s are frequently arduous and can be incredibly time-consuming. In fact, Simpli.fi had been given a migration plan to follow from GCP that would have taken about two years to complete.

"We used Terraform to stand up our GCP servers instead of working from GCP's charts. We went from zero to a thousand in fifteen minutes, which we'd never seen anyone do before,” Scott says.” If we'd done it GCP’s way, it would have taken us a couple of years. Instead, we ended up getting the entire environment set up in only eight months."

Simpli.fi now leverages HashiCorp Consul and Nomad to manage and link up its containerized applications across its various data centers and cloud environments. Nomad enables the team to specify the resources required by each application — CPU, memory, and disk space — and then automatically schedule and deploy the application onto the appropriate nodes within the infrastructure.

“We have Nomad already in production, which enables prototyping that would have been impossible in our previous environment,” Scott says. “We used to spin up a theme and send it to the server to prototype, which could take days or weeks. Large projects that used to take three months now take 5 minutes.”

Meanwhile, Consul has helped further refine and reshape the team’s operations. Unlike other solutions that either only supported Kubernetes or didn’t provide support at all, Consul delivers effortless service discovery across myriad environments — including Kubernetes.

Now, it’s faster and easier to migrate workloads and ensure that all the services are working together and the solution’s service mesh capabilities also enable the team to keep track of all its services and respective IP addresses and better manage traffic between services for maximum availability and performance.

“Consul’s service discovery, load balancing, and health checking capabilities directly improve the reliability and scalability of our whole platform,” Scott opines. “We used to spend more than $10,000 a month on load balancers for backend servers, but Consul has replaced them while also eliminating having to manage performance all by hand. Now we can just code a file to run everything.”

Zero trust for maximum security

Processing massive amounts of customer and end-user data also comes with inherent security risks. Scott envisions HashiCorp solutions like Vault will fit seamlessly within Simpli.fi's zero-trust cloud infrastructure strategy.

With Vault, Simpli.fi will be able centrally store, access, and distribute dynamic secrets and tightly control both human-to-machine and machine-to-machine access to sensitive systems and data. Having already implemented a variety of security controls and technologies, the company will further enhance its security posture by combining Consul with Vault to secure its service networking and increase confidence among customers and internal operators that only authorized users have access.

"The zero-trust security framework will be really valuable for us when it’s fully implemented. It’ll allow us to verify and authorize every request made to our infrastructure, which can help to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches while delivering a high-performance, high-availability platform that underpins our customers’ businesses."

Unlocking future value

With Simpli.fi’s cloud infrastructure on a mature, stable footing, the engineering team is looking forward to a broader adoption of Nomad. Scott sees a lot of applications that could benefit from scheduling jobs or running smaller workloads without having to worry about server resources. Having these tools available to the infrastructure team opens up new opportunities for streamlining and optimizing workloads.

“I’ve worked with a lot of different products, but very few have offered such positive experiences as HashiCorp,” enthuses Scott. “They're designed for engineers and operators, and it shows.”

With products that work seamlessly together but also separately, new uses are unlocked and services are up and running sooner. "We've seen a lot of benefits from using HashiCorp's products and frameworks,” Scott says. “They've helped us to improve our security posture and better manage our infrastructure, which has allowed us to better serve our customers and put us on the path to achieve bigger, broader, and previously impossible business goals."