Teamwork makes the dream work

New infrastructure strategy, unprecedented insights

Migrating from on-premises deployments to the cloud was such a large undertaking that it required TeamSystem to rethink how it built the underlying infrastructure to support the move. In particular, the company wanted to move away from its patchwork network of systems and tools to a more efficient, standardized, and predictable operating model.

“Starting from scratch, we wanted a declarative infrastructure provisioning solution that set parameters for how infrastructure is deployed without room for interpretation or mistakes,” Poli explains. “Beyond that, we wanted a solution that would allow us to manage everything from a single point of view, enable easy onboarding for our staff, and offer expansive support and community engagement options.”

After evaluating cloud provider-based solutions, TeamSystem adopted HashiCorp Terraform as the infrastructure as code solution of choice to provision and manage infrastructure. Terraform’s easy-to-understand language, reusable code modules, and cloud- and platform-agnostic architecture are ideally suited to overcome common challenges in cloud transformations — and the specific ones TeamSystem faced.

When Poli’s platform team first kicked off the cloud initiative with the company’s first SaaS solution delivered via Azure, the team discovered that its various pre-Terraform environments were preventing other products from timely development and deployment.

There were individual environments for development, for testing, for demos, and then for production. Each one required understanding different languages, workflows, and documentation standards that added to every project unnecessary complexity, time, and risk of incompatible components breaking a system.

“With Terraform, we standardized workflows for both app development and infrastructure deployment by implementing reusable code modules built with specific security and operational parameters,” Poli explains. “Now, our developers can now define the infrastructure their projects need, understand the cost implications on the overall project, and automatically provision it to any cloud with just a few clicks all on their own. It’s a level of granularity and visibility we never had before.”

Knocking down obstacles to long-term growth

Incorporating Terraform has helped TeamSystem usher in a new era of growth and development. Poli says that as the company continues its cloud migration initiative, the ability to manage its entire cloud environment from a single place will pay dividends.

Specifically, Terraform’s Sentinel policies ensure that all resources deployed meet the company’s stringent security standards, an action Poli calls “platform hardening.” Sentinel policies define rules that restrict the provisioning of resources between the plan and apply phases of a run, preventing out-of-policy infrastructure from being provisioned and unburdening the platform team from time-consuming manual management.

“Terraform eliminates many of the governance challenges we had before when we were trying to manage our work through different processes and tools,” he says. “Now we can easily track who made changes to infrastructure, when, why, and how in every cloud instance. It gives us a digital audit trail to refer to any time there’s a concern or an issue so we can make the necessary adjustments on the fly.”

According to Poli, developers can now work independently and self-serve with the infrastructure their projects demand, enabling the team to release new features and capabilities exponentially faster than before.

“Because of the nature of our old workflows we limited feature releases to two times per year,” Poli says. “By standardizing our processes and enabling greater self-service with Terraform, we can release new features every two weeks.”

In addition to more streamlined operations, Poli says he and other leaders can focus more of their attention to more strategic pursuits — planning, go-to-market strategies, and other essential revenue-oriented tasks — because he’s not tied down managing the minute-to-minute operational demands.

“Terraform makes it easy for our developers to work independently and self-serve the infrastructure their projects need to be successful,” he says. “Now, I save at least a full week’s worth of work every week that I can dedicate to other priorities instead of worrying about provisioning. It’s been a huge and positive shift for everyone and we’re looking forward to bringing on other HashiCorp tools to further improve our operations and service to our customers.”