Answering the call

Democratizing infrastructure to accelerate transformation Recognizing that having a central infrastructure team for an increasingly cloud-first organization isn’t scalable, Di Saverio and his colleagues set out to decouple workstreams and democratize access to infrastructure with an infrastructure as code (IaC) solution.

The concept was simple: eliminate the barriers to innovation and deliverability without sacrificing security, compliance, or the ability to control costs. But the impact on the business — provided the team got it right — promised to be enormous.

“We wanted to transform our work culture while also delivering real value to the business,” Romano explains. “Democratizing infrastructure through Terraform Cloud enables real decentralized ownership. It creates golden pathways for teams to iterate and own their own cloud infrastructure so the ‘you build it, you ship it, you love it’ motto applies from start to finish.”

Terraform Cloud enables effortless, automated provisioning of cloud resources. Vodafone Italy developers can use Vodafone-compliant patterns created in Terraform modules, served through the private registry, to stand up the infrastructure their particular service or microservice demands through reuse of pre-approved and peer-reviewed Infrastructure-as-code modules — instead of muddling through the previous months-long approval process.

The platform’s role-based access control and Sentinel policy capabilities create a single, yet segregated environment that grants minimum privileges for developers, cloud engineers, and operations managers while automating compliance reviews and continuous improvement of the company’s security posture.

But Romano says the value of the solution goes well beyond that. Vodafone Italy uses Terraform Cloud to create databases, set up its repository and team structure on Github, and create CI/CD pipelines on Jenkins and Microsoft Azure DevOps Services.

Terraform Cloud also serves as an upskilling platform for developers, who can search the private registry for a solution that’s been implemented by other colleagues. This not only helps developers hone their skill sets, but also fuels internal collaboration to share code and common approaches (i.e. InnerSource) across borders to other local Vodafone markets.

“Terraform Cloud gives us real agility without compromising innovation firepower because now we can experiment with serverless workloads and still support legacy applications, all with a code-first approach,” Romano says. “We can manage via our monitoring primitives on third-party suppliers, our source code management (SCM) strategy, and developer permissions to help ensure compliance for over 14 different AWS accounts and hundreds of applications spanning more than 25 clusters. That would be impossible without decentralized ownership and infrastructure as code.”

Transformed infrastructure, transformed culture

For Di Saverio, adopting Terraform Cloud has delivered significant, concrete benefits to the company’s business and its bottom line. He says that Terraform Cloud is the conduit that enables autonomous teams to own their innovations and quickly iterate on their infrastructure. They can effectively balance operating costs with the value they bring to the table — without worrying about managing and maintaining Terraform themselves.

“Today, with roughly the same size team as before, we’ve accelerated our release cadence 3x by cutting infrastructure setup times from three months to one week” he says. “Terraform accounts for about 95% of our infrastructure work, and as we get further along in our migration process we expect to see those figures continue to improve.”

In addition to faster time to market for updates and new releases, Vodafone Italy’s skilled IT professionals now have more time and autonomy to focus on higher-value activities like delicate migrations and high-priority incidents.

“HashiCorp is a long-term partner for us and Terraform Cloud is a cornerstone of our operations, security, and compliance processes. Alternative solutions are either not cost effective or simply lack much of the foundational functionality we need,” Di Saverio explains. “More importantly, Terraform empowers our organization to innovate freely within the guardrails imposed by and embedded in the platform. It’s exactly the formula we need to stay ahead of the competition without compromising the compliance or security of our environment.”