The Challenge

For a rapidly scaling company with a large and robust cloud infrastructure, Windward found it extremely difficult to manage and govern its AWS environments efficiently.  

The combination of error-prone manual resource configuration, lack of version control, inconsistencies, and scalability drove Windward’s engineering to standardize their cloud environments by utilizing Terraform.

Despite high Terraform usage, the WindWard DevSecOps team still faced challenges managing and governing their AWS resources. 

• Employees were still modifying resource configurations through the AWS Console, causing Terraform Drifts that negatively impacted the standardization they attempted to implement with Infrastructure as Code. 
• Whenever an infrastructure change was needed, Terraform ‘Plan’ and ‘Apply’ were run on the DevOps personal laptops, wasting time, being counterproductive, and creating unnecessary operational bottlenecks. 
• Lack of visibility and auditing of infrastructure changes made it extremely difficult to troubleshoot and know exactly who modified what resource and when. 
• Shifting more of their infrastructure to Terraform Code required extensive DevOps resources. 

So, six months after initially shifting to Terraform, Jonathann Zenou, Director of DevSecOps at Windward, sought an IaC Automation solution to help him overcome these challenges and level up his cloud governance with Terraform. 

The Solution 

Windward evaluated several platforms in their search for a Terraform Automation Platform but eventually decided on ControlMonkey as their preferred solution. 

While other platforms covered only specific aspects of Terraform Automation, ControlMonkey was the only solution that provided the most comprehensive Terraform Automation, was the fastest to implement, and was extremely simple to use. 

Onboarding the ControlMonkey platform and integrating their Terraform stacks was super-easy, enabling the DevOps team to get started immediately. 

Since implementing ControlMonkey six months ago, the WindWard DevSecOps team has been able to: 

• Run Terraform ‘Plan’ and ‘Apply’ from a centralized, collaborative space and eliminate the need to use their personal laptops.
  Whenever a Pull Request was created, the team had full visibility into which resources would be changed and the impact of those changes on security, cost, and other compliance requirements. 
• Using ControlMonkey Terraform Import Engine, they shifted more AWS resources to Terraform. They increased their Terraform coverage without writing a single line of code, saving the team precious time routed to strategy and innovation. 
• Implement proactive control policies for any new infrastructure change using the ControlMonkey Terraform CI/CD solution.
  • Enforce tagging of every resource to leverage AWS EDP. 
  • Prevent the deletion of Production resources. 
• Automate the onboarding of new employees using Terraform – ControlMonkey automates the creation of all user accounts for the subsystems employees use (e.g., AWS, Jenkins), making their workflows more efficient. 
• Automate the validation of any PR with ControlMonkey’s bot. The bot runs the Terraform ‘Plan’ and provides a detailed report of where and why it failed, leaving the DevSecOps only to need to approve and merge the PR.
• Easily investigate production incidents with a clear audit log of who changed what resource configuration and when, significantly reducing the investigation time from minutes to seconds.

• Extract SLDC and audit reports from their SOC and present them to their security auditors. 
• Enable developers to launch infrastructure resources independently using ControMonkey’s Self-service solution (Internal Developer Platform)
• Shift left their security and compliance measures as part of the Infrastructure CI/CD.