The Power of Predictable Terraform Management — Speed with Control

Summary

Senior DevOps Engineer Rick Arroues sums up the impact Spacelift has had on PAR Retail: "The biggest benefit is being able to move fast while staying in control. In theory, I could write up some automation that runs every stack. That's not a realistic scenario though because then I spend all that time attempting to create and maintain a method that won't have any of the safeguards Spacelift offers to keep things from blowing up in our faces."

30+Environments managed seamlessly with Spacelift

12+Stacks per environment visible at a glance

PAR Retail is a leading technology company that empowers convenience and fuel retailers with tailored loyalty strategies to enhance customer engagement and retention. The PAR Retail team is about 180 people, with a DevOps team of 10 supporting 42 developers across five teams.

The challenge Spacelift solves for PAR Retail

PAR Retail uses Spacelift mainly to eliminate bulk work in the management of Terraform, as Senior DevOps Engineer Rick Arroues explains: “We’ve got 30-plus environments with over a dozen stacks each that’s just repeat work. So the bulk management of that is really, really great for us. Let’s say I need to run one particular stack: I can go grab all 12 at a time and manage those and have a picture of what’s going on. The local preview has been fantastic for the growing team. We’re not stepping on each other’s toes in terms of state.”

The value of stability

“The stability saves us time that cannot easily be measured. The trust in the application means few to no surprises in our practices. It’s not that it saves me an hour a week in my process, but that it saves me from being interrupted by any instability in my process caused by trying to manage Terraform.”

Rick Arroues, Senior DevOps Engineer

Terraform with no surprises

Without Spacelift, PAR Retail’s current infrastructure strategy would struggle with the challenges that arise when multiple engineers are working separately within the same project. The following measures allow teammates to work in Terraform together without obstructing each other:

Open Policy Agent (OPA) offers guardrails and consistency to system behavior.
State and run management keep the state consistent.
Local preview means devs can work without locking state.
Run history is available from the first local test.
The run queue keeps everything ordered — and DevOps can also interact with it to prioritize work on the fly if needed.

Streamlined processes for painless infrastructure

Using the Spacelift platform takes the drama out of managing the infrastructure that ensures PAR Retail can guarantee business outcomes for its customers. As Rick Arroues concludes:

“I couldn’t even begin to quantify the time that Spacelift saves us.

I would have to build automations — because there’s no way we’re going to do it manually. Then I would have to maintain those automations and try to build in the safeguards Spacelift offers. It would take far too long to make an in-house product as dependable, flexible, and scalable, and maintain it, with the size and workload of our team.“

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