Best foot forward

Migrate to innovate

At Skechers USA, Inc., footwear is about more than function — it is a powerful combination of technological innovation and personal identity. The Comfort Technology Company®’s collection of lifestyle and performance footwear, apparel, and accessories are available in 180 countries and territories, both online and in-store. Forward-thinking, innovative, and always on trend, Skechers has become the brand of choice for millions of customers worldwide looking to express themselves in style and comfort at home and work.

Skechers' commitment to innovation is equally pervasive throughout its IT organization. To stay a step ahead of the competition and offer an even better customer experience, the cloud platform team wanted to modernize its infrastructure by moving away from its in-house data centers. But with workloads spread across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and other cloud service providers, the company’s cloud journey was complicated. It needed a more self-service, automated approach to reach its goals.

“We've been on a migration path to the cloud for a number of years. We have a significant amount of workloads already running in the cloud, but one of the biggest challenges from a business and technological perspective was, how do we accelerate that?” asks Ramon Borunda, Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Skechers.

Process in the way of progress

As drivers of the company’s cloud transformation, the Skechers’ cloud platform team was doing their best to help their stakeholders reassess and rearchitect their infrastructure. But, several significant roadblocks held them back.

For starters, resource requests submitted via simple ServiceNow forms with open-ended questions left room for interpretation, requiring a good deal of back-and-forth between parties to clarify needs and confirm approvals. The result was lengthy lead times, bumping this issue to the top of their priority list.

Their goal was to ensure that when an end user submitted a request through ServiceNow, the entire process unfolded seamlessly. While certain gated processes required reviews, the ultimate vision was a fully automated self-service model where a request would trigger back-end actions and eliminate manual steps.

In addition to solving these resource request bottlenecks, the cloud platform team needed to proactively implement security from the start of the cloud provisioning process. At the time, platform engineers had the liberty to build and deploy resources as they saw fit, leading to inconsistencies — even between resources of the same type — and an increased likelihood of human error. The resulting security risk of misconfigured cloud resources was substantial.

Finally, the team wanted to address a long-term goal to integrate FinOps into their processes to bring more predictability to expenses and budgeting.

Modernization from the inside out

Borunda believed he had the solution. “I've been an avid user of Terraform Community Edition for many years, so the idea of using the software as a service (SaaS) offering made a lot of sense for us. We adopted HashiCorp Terraform because it allows us to continue to write our code but no longer worry about the administrative tasks around it,” he says.

HCP Terraform provides Skechers with mechanisms to modernize its infrastructure administration and management from the inside out. Resource-specific ServiceNow forms with highly targeted, close-ended questions now supply the cloud platform team with all necessary details upfront. An automated workflow streamlines reviews and approvals, speeding up provisioning while keeping all parties up to date.

“This particular flow has been a huge success with our end users. They appreciate the fact that they're kept in the loop rather than being in ‘an in-progress limbo’ with no real traction behind their tickets,” notes Borunda.

Inconsistent deployment practices are a thing of the past, as are the risks they pose. “By leveraging HCP Terraform and its private registry, we have modules that we can reuse, giving us consistency in how we build things that we didn't have before,” says Borunda. “Having the ability to create reusable modules makes a tremendous difference for my team, our end users, and ultimately our customers.”

HCP Terraform’s run tasks also allow the team to integrate third-party tools into the run lifecycle that provide cost projections, cybersecurity analysis, and guardrails — successfully filling FinOps and security gaps.

Skechers streamlines infrastructure provisioning, standardizes deployment practices, shifts left on FinOps and security, and speeds up application delivery by embracing self-service and automation with HCP Terraform and ServiceNow.