Case Studies
20 March, 2024
Background
TeraSky was approached recently by the R&D unit of a company that caters to the world’s leading communications and media companies. The organization offers cloud-native product suites that help its clients leverage the latest technologies to address a variety of business challenges, including catalog management, monetization, and IoT.
Until recently, when deploying their infrastructure – using both on-premises and cloud systems – the company’s team did so manually: a developer would open a ticket with the IT unit, and the IT team would create the requested infrastructure based on their existing tools and processes, reporting back to the user once it was ready for use.
Because the company works in an agile manner, bringing infrastructure up and down multiple times a day, the manual deployment process was becoming cumbersome. Further, there were often inconsistencies between what that development team wanted and what the IT team ended up deploying, whether due to miscommunications or nuances lost in translation during the ticketing process.
The Challenge
The client’s deployment process needed to be more efficient, automated, and better documented to keep pace with the needs of their global clientele. Due to the hybrid infrastructure, countless third parties, and multiple cloud providers, the right solution also needed expert implementation, taking into account the entire enterprise ecosystem and future phases.
The Solution
TeraSky understood that HashiCorp Terraform was the tool to address all of the issues their client was facing. Because HashiCorp Terraform offers a unified coding language for both the requests and the deployment, there would be no misunderstandings between the two sides, and the process could be fully automated and documented.
The solution TeraSky designed and implemented was broad sweeping. From integrating with VMware vSphere to deploying on the Red Hat OpenShift platform the client uses, TeraSky created the automation processes that would revolutionize their request and deployment process. They also prepared unique workspaces for each of the different internal groups with permissions and role-based access control, integrated them with the client’s BitBucket repository for source control, and designed the deployment request application applied to the system. The implementation of HashiCorp Terraform also included the creation of governance mechanisms, to ensure that the service consumer’s request doesn’t compromise the environment as a whole. In the best sense of the word, TeraSky helped the client exploit all of the advantages of IaaS – clear language to avoid conflicts, automation, documentation, and greater control.
The Bottom Line
To keep up with their product development schedules and reduce headaches, the R&D unit of a leading communications solution provider needed a comprehensive overhaul of their infrastructure deployment processes. By applying a custom design and implementation of HashiCorp Terraform, TeraSky helped them resolve their present concerns and prepare for future growth.
“There is a whole ‘ecosystem of systems’ that need to be integrated as part of the automation,” explained Lir Shif, TeraSky’s VP of Solution Architecture. “Our deep expertise in HashiCorp Terraform, VMware vSphere, and general automation was critical. We were able to understand the system as a whole, deploying the application to the highest standard while relating to third parties like CMDB, IT management systems, and so on.”
A representative of the company explained why the project made such a difference: “TeraSky was able to see the whole picture, implementing the technology while considering the entire flow, end to end, and designing the solution to be flexible enough that we won’t need to refactor or rebuild the platform from scratch for future phases. They’ve taken our foot off the brake pedal today and ensured we can maintain our momentum in the future.”