How Brace has achieved a level of simplicity that makes life easier for their DevOps team

Fast-growing Brace wanted to streamline its infrastructure processes as its needs evolved. They chose Spacelift for its powerful and growing feature set. As a result, the company has accelerated its deployment processes while auditing–critically important in the financial services world–is now much more straightforward. Spacelift has helped Brace achieve a level of simplicity that makes life much easier for DevOps and developer teams alike.

Eric Berg is Brace’s Lead DevOps Engineer, managing the company’s entire infrastructure and empowering its developers to do their best work in the most efficient way. He spoke to us about Spacelift’s impact.

As Brace has grown, so have the demands on the company’s infrastructure. They needed to wrap all the complexities of Terraform and the vagaries of multiple different environments and many kinds of stack into something simpler that suited their workflow and gave developers full visibility and control over the situation. 

“We needed a way to create consistent run environments and provide auditing. And we increasingly needed to be able to hand off approvals for runs to developers and security staff,” explained Eric.

A comparison with the competition revealed that Spacelift did the best job of meeting the company’s needs, with a fast-developing product that is regularly adding features in response to its users’ needs.

Using Spacelift has been a really positive experience for Brace, making it really easy to perform tasks that would otherwise be very complex. 

“For example, I’ve set up individual stacks for things like DNS, and multi-stacks for deploying to all eight environments. Based on similar configs in our Spacelift Terraform module, I was able to copy that YAML, and boom – I had three more stacks for access, infrastructure, and the databases I was about to implement. And each one of those was eight or 10 stacks that all behave the right way, that are all connected and triggered at the right times, with the right permissions, just by editing a YAML file. It’s a default with overrides for each environment, and it gives me all the flexibility I need” explains Eric. 

Brace developers also really like Spacelift. The GitHub plugin allows them to see exactly what has changed, and everything gets reported to Slack and Datadog, so everyone knows what has happened, as it happens. “I have Datadog events and Slack notifications configured into after-apply hooks or all my stacks, so developers know when their applications deploy and the Terraform at large deploys,” says Eric.  

“Spacelift is a tremendous time saver for me, and that in turn makes our entire development and deployment process smoother and simpler.”

Eric recently saw a Slack notification telling him there had been a production release, and for the first time, he was the last to know about it. Such simplicity was something the company had been working toward from the very beginning, and Spacelift has been vital to achieving it.

Developers used to have to ask Eric to do sandbox, but they don’t need to now they have Terraform in continuous integration. It’s also very good for users who are contributing to Eric’s Terraform repositories because they can get immediate feedback on the plans, which they can see in GitHub or Spacelift, without the need to set up to run potentially complex Terraform.

Spacelift also provides peace of mind in terms of auditing, which is a requirement in Brace’s highly-regulated environment. Spacelift has made that simple, so it’s had a positive impact on the company as a whole. 

“Spacelift is like the final stitching on a football; it neatly ties together all of our infrastructure in a way that makes life really simple for our developers – and for me,” Eric sums up.