Elevate Switches from Terraform Cloud, Achieves Faster Deployments and Cost Predictability

Background

Elevate is transforming employee benefits account management with its AI-driven, cloud-based platform. Focusing on HSAs, FSAs, and HRAs, Elevate offers automated claims processing, real-time reimbursements, and seamless integrations to streamline benefits administration and enhance employee experience.

Running on both AWS and Azure, Elevate leverages Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines to maintain consistent deployments and efficient management across its environments.

Challenge

Elevate initially used HashiCorp Terraform Cloud to manage infrastructure deployments, supporting consistent and scalable IaC practices across multiple environments. 

However, as Elevate’s infrastructure grew, the team encountered limitations with Terraform Cloud’s concurrency, which restricted simultaneous deployments and slowed development cycles, impacting productivity.

Terraform Cloud’s resource-based pricing model requires forecasting resource usage, making it challenging for Elevate to budget accurately as it scales. This led to unexpected expense increases, highlighting the need for a platform that could support rapid growth with flexible deployment capabilities and predictable costs.

Recognizing the need for a more flexible platform, the Elevate team was also cautious of potential disruptions from a complex migration process. Still, Elevate sought a solution that could enhance efficiency and provide better control.

Solution

After researching various options, the Elevate team was introduced to env0. Following an initial demo showcasing env0’s capabilities, the team decided to proceed with a proof of concept (PoC).

The PoC confirmed env0’s ability to meet Elevate’s infrastructure needs with ease and speed, leading to a seamless migration. Using env0’s migration tools and project hierarchy, Elevate restructured its IaC setup during the migration process, breaking down workspaces into distinct directories. This led to a cleaner, and easier-to-maintainable configuration and enabled running tasks in parallel, significantly saving valuable time.

Moreover, env0’s pricing model allowed Elevate to significantly expand its IaC and CI/CD usage to include several SaaS and PaaS services critical to its product, beyond just AWS. 

Finally, env0’s also provided Elevate with in-line plan previews and accessible full deployment logs, allowing for smoother workflows and greater control over each environment. 

This setup enabled Elevate to streamline configurations and tailor its IaC structure to support evolving infrastructure needs more effectively.

“With env0, it’s a clear, structured process. We bring the code in, it’s documented, and everything just works—the interface is clean and intuitive,” shared Paul Trout, Sr. Cloud Architect at Elevate.

Alongside switching to env0, Elevate leveraged the platform’s native integration to transition from Terraform to OpenTofu, addressing concerns about the long-term risks of vendor lock-in.

“Migration is a very scary word, especially when it’s the core piece of infrastructure that drives your production releases,” added Trout. “With the outstanding support, the responsiveness of env0, and the platform’s powerful features, we migrated to both env0 and OpenTofu within a few weeks.”

Results

Within a few weeks, Elevate transitioned from Terraform Cloud to env0, unlocking key improvements across cloud infrastructure:

• Rapid Migration Minimizing Downtime: env0’s dedicated TFC migration tools and expert support enabled Elevate to migrate rapidly with minimal downtime, allowing for a smooth transition without disrupting daily operations.
• Predictable and Scalable IaC Management Costs: By switching from Terraform Cloud to env0’s deployment-based pricing, Elevate gained a cost model that would predictably scale with usage,  removing financial barriers to growth.
• Streamlined Deployment Efficiency and Reduced Friction: env0’s unlimited concurrency and seamless GitHub integration enabled Elevate to reduce deployment times by 65%. 
• Avoided Vendor Lock-in with OpenTofu Migration: Leveraging env0’s native OpenTofu integration and dedicated support, Elevate seamlessly transitioned from Terraform to OpenTofu, avoiding the potential negative implications of vendor lock-in.

What’s Next

With env0 fully integrated into its infrastructure management, Elevate plans to continue expanding its IaC capabilities to support future growth and evolving operational needs. 

The team aims to complete the migration of the remaining core resources to env0, ensuring that all critical environments benefit from streamlined deployment workflows and cost efficiencies.

The Elevate team is now also working on a multi-tenant reporting solution to enhance customer insights. env0’s support will be key in deploying and managing this project efficiently as it scales across multiple environments.

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