Elevate Switches from Terraform Cloud, Achieves Faster Deployments and Cost Predictability

Elevate is transforming employee benefits account management with its AI-driven, cloud-based platform. Focusing on HSAs, FSAs, and HRAs, Elevate offers automated claims processing, real-time reimbursements, and seamless integrations to streamline benefits administration and enhance employee experience.

Running on both AWS and Azure, Elevate leverages Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines to maintain consistent deployments and efficient management across its environments.

Elevate initially used HashiCorp Terraform Cloud to manage infrastructure deployments, supporting consistent and scalable IaC practices across multiple environments. 

However, as Elevate’s infrastructure grew, the team encountered limitations with Terraform Cloud’s concurrency, which restricted simultaneous deployments and slowed development cycles, impacting productivity.

Terraform Cloud’s resource-based pricing model requires forecasting resource usage, making it challenging for Elevate to budget accurately as it scales. This led to unexpected expense increases, highlighting the need for a platform that could support rapid growth with flexible deployment capabilities and predictable costs.

Recognizing the need for a more flexible platform, the Elevate team was also cautious of potential disruptions from a complex migration process. Still, Elevate sought a solution that could enhance efficiency and provide better control.

After researching various options, the Elevate team was introduced to env zero. Following an initial demo showcasing env zero’s capabilities, the team decided to proceed with a proof of concept (PoC).

The PoC confirmed env zero’s ability to meet Elevate’s infrastructure needs with ease and speed, leading to a seamless migration. Using env zero’s migration tools and project hierarchy, Elevate restructured its IaC setup during the migration process, breaking down workspaces into distinct directories. This led to a cleaner, and easier-to-maintainable configuration and enabled running tasks in parallel, significantly saving valuable time.

Moreover, env zero’s pricing model allowed Elevate to significantly expand its IaC and CI/CD usage to include several SaaS and PaaS services critical to its product, beyond just AWS. 

Finally, env zero’s also provided Elevate with in-line plan previews and accessible full deployment logs, allowing for smoother workflows and greater control over each environment. 

This setup enabled Elevate to streamline configurations and tailor its IaC structure to support evolving infrastructure needs more effectively.

“With env zero, it’s a clear, structured process. We bring the code in, it’s documented, and everything just works—the interface is clean and intuitive,” shared Paul Trout, Sr. Cloud Architect at Elevate.

Alongside switching to env zero, Elevate leveraged the platform’s native integration to transition from Terraform to OpenTofu, addressing concerns about the long-term risks of vendor lock-in.

“Migration is a very scary word, especially when it’s the core piece of infrastructure that drives your production releases,” added Trout. “With the outstanding support, the responsiveness of env zero, and the platform’s powerful features, we migrated to both env zero and OpenTofu within a few weeks.”