Singapore media leader modernizes its cloud operating model

Cloud platform team paves way for federation, automation

To overcome these hurdles, SPH Media had formed a unified cloud platform team for individuals focused on cloud governance and infrastructure deployment. It had also provided a coordinated workstream that instilled better communication and knowledge-sharing between stakeholders involved in modernizing SPH Media’s infrastructure and applications.

Instead of gatekeeping cloud resources, the platform team focused on enablement of application teams. With this shift in mindset, the cloud became a self-service resource federated out to SPH Media’s engineers, rather than something controlled by IT. The platform team also set up guardrails and policies for secure cloud use, completely changing the security paradigm by lifting the burden from individual developers.

“As you create a decentralized, self-service model, you want to make sure you have a very strong team to train others within the organization,” says Yong Wen, head of platform engineering. “This led to the formation of the cloud platform team where members of the team are experts on cloud infrastructure and can create vetted modules that the application developers are encouraged to use and adopt.”

SPH Media’s cloud platform team purchased the HashiCorp Cloud suite on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform, including Terraform, Packer, Vault, Consul, and Boundary, providing a flexible and accelerated path to using and deriving value from HashiCorp solutions.

The mindset shifts, new cloud platform team, and HashiCorp tooling ultimately allowed SPH Media’s developers to get applications and services up and running smoothly and more quickly than ever.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform standardizes the cloud operating model

Standardizing on HashiCorp products have provided standardized, automated workflows with security and compliance to speed up development and digital initiatives. HashiCorp solutions architects advised SPH Media during their journey as the team redesigned the AWS cloud estate.

HashiCorp’s suite of tools allowed SPH Media to create new isolated virtual private clouds not connected by AWS transit gateways. A service mesh built with the new Consul DataPlane feature provided transparency, fewer potentially overlapping IP addresses and gave SPH Media better control over network traffic. Terraform automated provisioning while Sentinel’s policies as code allowed IT admins to keep control over workflows. Vault provided dynamic credentials management for applications to improve the company’s security posture. The cloud platform team is also exploring Boundary as an avenue for providing human access to internal services in the future.

Standardizing on HashiCorp, automating, and federating resource deployment has also: Given developer teams the freedom to get started on Day 1 faster, rather than spending time procuring the services they need to use. Helped SPH Media operationalize cloud estates, with operations, security, and networking teams adopting a common infrastructure foundation. Provided better security visibility, so the platform team can more easily figure out where things went wrong when issues arise. Enabled a programmatic way to provide identity access and prevent credential theft while establishing a zero-trust environment in the cloud.

As SPH Media implemented HashiCorp tools, HashiCorp’s account team had organized Terraform training workshops, answered questions from SPH Media’s engineering team and provided access to specialists and the HashiCorp product team.

“The collaboration process was eye-opening and by working closely with HashiCorp especially in advance testing and implementation of new product features, we could ensure that our modernization process went well,” said Yong Wen. “This close partnership has even enabled folks who have never done automation before to get started quickly on Terraform compared to other platforms.”

Standardizing on HashiCorp meant more time for engineers to help the business with mission-critical work. The cutting-edge tools also created excitement for job candidates, and helped SPH Media to attract and retain engineering talent. With HashiCorp, SPH Media had improved its infrastructure use and built brand awareness as an innovative organization.