How Checkout has increased efficiency company-wide

Checkout.com is a highly flexible and customizable payments platform that helps global brands deliver faster, more reliable transactions.

They were using Jenkins for their Terraform infrastructure-as-code deployments, but the user experience didn’t meet their needs. Then they turned to Spacelift.

Marius Galbinasu, Senior Engineering Manager at Checkout.com, explains why his team switched and the impact it’s had on the company.

Checkout found Jenkins to be a good generic tool, but it didn’t offer anything specific in the area of deploying infrastructure, so they looked for an alternative. “We didn’t get enough information and control over what was being run, while deployment pipelines were inconsistent,” Marius Galbinasu explained. 

They chose Spacelift as a Terraform-specific tool that would streamline their work and allow them to be more consistent with their output without having to reorganize their code in GitHub or hand over control of state files, as rival tools might require.

One of the best things about Checkout’s experience of moving to Spacelift was the level of support and the knowledge of the team. 

“When we have a question, we always get an almost instant answer or at least attention. And it’s great to be able to request features and see them work on them or plan to deliver them at a later date. Some of the features Spacelift offers were essentially built for us because we specifically requested them,” says Marius.

Using Spacelift has improved Checkout’s overall developer experience around deploying infrastructure. Features like proposed runs on code changes have improved their GitHub workflows, and now the ability to add comments means they get instant feedback for what code changes mean in reality. 

They also now have an estimate of their costs through the Infracost integration Spacelift provides, and they have control over what types of resources can be deployed in our AWS environment, enforced through Spacelift.

Checkout develops faster with Spacelift. They can now get feedback on what their code will do much more quickly, and they can apply those changes faster by replacing manual steps with triggering a pipeline and relying on GitHub commits. 

That increased efficiency has an impact across the company. They can effectively advertise and share their Terraform code across multiple teams and organizations. 

Checkout has around 30 Spacelift organizations and dozens of Terraform modules that they share across the company. Spacelift makes it easy to share that reusable code, generate documentation for it, and write instructions on how to use it.

Code reviews are more efficient, too. “Our entire code review process now happens in GitHub because Spacelift’s checks show up there, letting us see what the cost will be and making sure that our policies are being applied consistently. It allows us to use GitHub as the only place we really need to go into to control our infrastructure as code,” explains Marius. “Everything is far more streamlined and consistent for the whole organization. In all, life is a lot easier with Spacelift on our side.”