Case Study: Sierra-Cedar's Customer Journey with Scalr

About Sierra-Cedar

Sierra-Cedar is a consulting and managed services company historically focused on the implementation, migration, and hosting of Oracle ERP software like Oracle Cloud, PeopleSoft, and Oracle eBusiness. Sierra-Cedar's DevOps Services division assists clients in planning, implementing, migrating, and managing Infrastructure-as-Code in AWS and other major cloud service providers.

Sierra-Cedar is a gold Scalr partner, providing a wide range of services from the design and architecture of new cloud services to retrofitting existing infrastructure with Terraform, policy-as-code with Open Policy Agent (OPA), and the configuration of and subsequent migration of Terraform to the Scalr platform.

How and Why Sierra-Cedar Started Using Terraform

As Sierra-Cedar began to adopt cloud technology for their hosted and managed services clients, they knew early on that there would be limitations on how effectively their teams could manage infrastructure via cloud provider consoles. They were attracted to Terraform due to its declarative language — defining what to build rather than how to build.

However, as they scaled out hosted client environments into the dozens and hundreds, they quickly realized they needed a way to collaborate more effectively across teams and business hours. Running Terraform from the command line simply was not going to get them to the next level. So they invested time and effort internally and built a custom Terraform Automation and Collaboration (TACO) tool to help with visibility across client pipelines.

Why They Built an Internal TACO

The simple answer: other tools didn't exist yet. Sierra-Cedar's tooling was built well before TACOs like Scalr, Terraform Cloud, and others were available in the market. It wasn't an effort they wanted to take on, as it required a significant lift from already overburdened development teams, but it was a necessity.

Once they started tracking the emergence of commercial TACOs, it was clear they would not be able to keep pace with the market. They made the decision to focus efforts on their core business and mothball internal tools in favor of Scalr. The simplicity of the migration effort and the favorable cost model were perfectly aligned with their needs.

Why Not Standard CI/CD?

Sierra-Cedar certainly went down the CI/CD road, and it worked well — for a while. The major version control systems (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) all support extensive CI/CD capabilities, including the ability to run Terraform.

However, when they scaled out the number of repositories and clients they were managing, they lost the single-pane-of-glass visibility into what was happening across their environments. They also couldn't easily decouple the approval process of merging code from applying it during a maintenance window — something that Scalr makes simple.

Why Scalr Was Selected

Sierra-Cedar evaluated all the main TACO offerings and found Scalr most aligned to their business needs across cost, capabilities, flexibility, organization, support, and responsiveness. Key factors included:

• Organizational Hierarchy: The logically related environments and workspaces provided exactly the flexibility needed — allowing flattened deployments, strict hierarchy with isolated deployments, or any mix of the two. For enterprise clients focused on segregation of duties, this is essential.
• Multi-Cloud Support: Support of multiple cloud service providers was a necessity.
• VCS Integration: Integration with major version control systems was a must.
• SSO and MFA: Single sign-on integration with multi-factor authentication, which is simple to integrate and configure in Scalr.
• Support Quality: During proof-of-concept testing, they experienced the best support turnaround times and time-to-resolution — important since Sierra-Cedar uses Scalr to support their own clients.
• Predictable Pricing: Scalr's cost model allows scaling client infrastructure with a predictable metric that makes sense (Terraform runs/month).

Security Approach

Sierra-Cedar approaches security as an onion, hardening the outer layers first and then working inward. Each layer is considered independently secure in addition to being secure as part of the greater system.

Key security capabilities leveraged in Scalr:

• AWS IAM Roles: Instead of requiring access keys that need manual rotation, Sierra-Cedar specifies IAM Roles secured with external IDs and manages their lifecycle with Terraform. This also works well in automated account "vending machine" environments.
• Fine-Grained Access Control: From viewing and editing environments and workspaces to viewing logs, executing runs, and managing credentials.
• ADFS Integration: SSO and MFA through Scalr's identity provider integrations.
• Everything as Code: Using the Scalr Terraform Provider to manage Scalr configuration itself.

Best Practices for New Scalr Customers

Sierra-Cedar recommends:

1. Plan, plan, plan! Organize your Terraform code to support modules/submodules and the isolated workspace layout that Scalr provides. This up-front work sets you up for scalable long-term success.
2. Think about organization: By business process? By teams? By project? A hybrid approach? Each has its own benefits and drawbacks — how you organize your RBAC will dictate flexibility down the road.
3. Everything as code! Use Scalr's Terraform provider to set up environments, workspaces, and other configuration elements programmatically.

Key Takeaways

Further Reading

For a complete guide to evaluating TACO platforms and planning a migration, see: Migrating Off Terraform Cloud/Enterprise: A Complete Guide.