Freeing Redfin teams to innovate with a redefined approach to IaC orchestration

We spoke to Carlos Castillo, Senior Cloud Operations Engineer at Redfin, about why the company decided to change its Terraform provider and how using Spacelift has redefined its approach to infrastructure orchestration. 

A dramatic change in their existing Terraform provider’s pricing model prompted Redfin’s search for a more cost-effective alternative. Cost may have been the initial motivation to change, but the team was not prepared to make sacrifices when it came to finding a robust, managed platform to replace their infrastructure orchestration solution. 

Redfin investigated Spacelift alternatives including Atlantis but swiftly ruled them out because using them would require an unacceptable level of hands-on management. Reasonable pricing made Spacelift the leading candidate to replace their IaC automation platform, and positive feedback from their engineers plus exceptional flexibility clinched the deal. Spacelift’s responsiveness before and after they signed the contract helped sustain and enhance those positive impressions. 

As the Redfin team adopted the Spacelift platform and started weaving it into their existing IaC operations, they found the onboarding process to be surprisingly smooth. “While we did hit a few bumps along the way — that’s to be expected when you’re dealing with complex infrastructure — Spacelift’s team was very responsive. Their pre- and post-sales engineers were always there to help us work through any issues,’ recalls Carlos Castillo, Senior Cloud Operations Engineer at Redfin. 

“While most projects use Atlantis, many were managed manually via CLI. This meant we had to come up with proper policies and workflows that would meet every scenario. With help from Spacelift documentation, we were able to design a process that made migrating easier.”

Redfin is about halfway through its adoption phase with Spacelift. “We’ve moved around 97 projects over to Spacelift — that’s about a quarter of our total infrastructure as code,” explains Carlos. Accomplishing full migration will continue through Q2 2025, but the company is already seeing positive results. Combined with internal changes in the way the team operates, Spacelift is helping Redfin slash the time it spends on monotonous but necessary tasks. “This means our teams can focus more on innovation and less on routine maintenance,” says Carlos. That is exactly what forward-thinking companies like Redfin want from their infrastructure orchestration solutions — the ability to automate important but repetitive maintenance tasks and dedicate their combined development and engineering efforts to work that adds genuine business value. 

Accelerating developer velocity with policies

Spacelift delivers this freedom to innovate with features like policies supported by Open Policy Agent (OPA) for secure, compliant IaC. “We’re heavily using the policies feature right now — it allows us to easily create specific workflows for different types of projects and automate certain procedures to our liking,” says Carlos.

In fact, one of the things Redfin is most excited about is how Spacelift has helped enhance the company’s governance. “Spacelift’s policy-as-code feature is a game-changer. We can now implement and enforce standards consistently across all our projects. It’s made collaboration between teams so much smoother, and we’ve seen a real uptick in developer velocity.”

Enabling outstanding flexibility

Spacelift’s flexibility really stood out from the start. “At Redfin, we have a pretty diverse set of infrastructure needs — everything from monorepos with multiple projects to single-use case repos for specific infrastructure as code. Spacelift’s adaptable platform helped us design processes to handle any one of these situations,” explains Carlos.

This flexibility and Spacelift’s robust feature set have allowed the team to completely reimagine its approach to infrastructure management. “We’re now more efficient, more consistent, and more scalable than ever before. Spacelift has become a crucial part of our infrastructure strategy, going far beyond the tool we originally thought it would be,” concludes Carlos.