Why infrastructure complexity, legacy resources, and mixed IaC approaches made codification an urgent priority
In 2024, the organization’s DevOps team faced significant challenges managing their AWS infrastructure. The environment was a complex mix of well-defined recent resources and older "brownfield" assets, with legacy resources often lacking proper codification and documentation.
The team was managing multiple technologies including AWS EKS (Kubernetes) clusters, S3, DynamoDB, and a self-hosted GitLab instance, using both Terraform and CloudFormation. This tool mix created visibility challenges, and operational friction that made delivery slower and work less efficient.
Key challenges included:
- Approximately 60% of infrastructure remained unmanaged and uncodified
- Manual workflows creating inefficiencies (think: repetitive work, no versioning, difficulty collaborating, etc.)
- Poor visibility into existing cloud assets dating back to 2018
- The need to ensure resiliency and infrastructure recovery post disaster
- Desire to standardize on Terraform while maintaining existing workflows
The scaling organization’s team identified Firefly as the solution to uncomplicate their cloud — and manage it all as code.
Using Firefly to achieve comprehensive infrastructure visibility and codification
The lifestyle brand’s journey with Firefly began with a clear priority: gaining complete visibility into their cloud assets and systematically codifying their infrastructure. The team’s lead DevOps Engineer explains:
“First and foremost, [we need a way to tackle] the number of unmanaged resources, and it's something we're essentially trying to get down to zero.”
To achieve full IaC coverage of their assets, the team worked with Firefly to:
- Inventory their cloud resources and identify which are codified, drifted, or unmanaged
- Enable disaster recovery and backup automation capabilities
- Streamline IaC automation in the CI/CD pipeline
- Standardize infrastructure management processes
- Improve security and compliance posture
Getting there meant starting by leveraging Firefly's capabilities for cloud asset inventory, infrastructure codification, and drift detection.
Results: From 60% unmanaged infra to operational control
Nearly a year after implementing Firefly, the team has seen significant improvements in infrastructure management and operational efficiency. The team has successfully codified a large percentage of their once-unmanaged infrastructure, saving hours on day-to-day operational efforts.
Firefly has become an integral part of cloud team’s development workflow, providing:
- Centralized CI/CD pipeline for IaC, including logging, build reporting and governance
- Solution to ensure full IaC coverage and notify about ClickOps events
- Real-time visibility into codified vs. drifted and unmanaged resources
- IaC excellence and central management solution for IaC tools
The team’s DevOps Engineer describes the transformation, and how Firefly has become engrained in their newly automated ways of working.
“We’ve used Firefly to codify our existing resources, and now, Firefly is part of our CI/CD process too, because it's where our reports live for the builds that we run."
What's on the horizon for their Firefly partnership?
As the brand’s cloud team continues to evolve their infrastructure, including ongoing migration efforts to Shopify for their e-commerce platform, Firefly is a critical solution for managing their AWS infrastructure. Following the success of the partnership, the team is also exploring additional Firefly capabilities, including governance features for security remediation and compliance, for even better, easier, and more secure cloud management.
Why stay the course? The team’s lead DevOps Engineer points to a few standout factors that make Firefly a long-term partner for the organization:
“Firefly is an easy, intuitive tool to use. It's robust. And there is so much you can do with the platform that we haven't even really leveraged it all. One of the things we want to be able to do better is catch anything that's out of compliance. And we can now."
The continued partnership showcases the Firefly platform’s ability to adapt to changing infrastructure needs: all while still providing consistent value through improved visibility, automation, and operational efficiency. It’s a solution for today’s CloudOps reality, ready for tomorrow’s CloudOps challenges. And with Firefly, this beloved lifestyle brand is now armed and ready to solve them. Together, we make clouds —and lives— less complicated, more efficient, and more beautiful.
