Comtech and Firefly: The beginning of a powerful partnership

Comtech Telecommunications Corp. is a global communications technology company —with a thriving culture of innovation— that believes in leaning on the latest in cutting-edge technology and outside-the-box thinking to provide best-in-class customer service. 

Key to accelerating that initiative is making the most of the right business tools. Among those innovative, game-changing investments for Comtech is Firefly.

How infrastructure complexity, resource constraints, and overreliance on ClickOps created an IaC opportunity

In early 2023, Comtech saw its development cloud infrastructure growing rapidly, and becoming more difficult to manage. Valuable time was being wasted by a team manually spinning up cloud resources through ClickOps. Cost optimization was a mission-critical priority. And multi-cloud complexity, for a team running multiple private clouds, AWS, and Azure, was a concern. 

Zooming out, changes across the organization compounded the problem further. Comtech was, at the time, consolidating nine divisions of its business into just two — resulting in a massive cloud footprint, a huge number of accounts, and inconsistent management across accounts. At the same time, the team was also looking to find its bearings with Terraform: understanding best practices, how to safely store state files, how to implement modules, etc. 

Comtech needed a better way to provision, manage, and control more cloud assets with confidence — without adding engineering resources. With Firefly, untangling that complexity was as simple as pushing a button (the Codify button in Firefly, of course!)

Using Firefly to provision, control and govern infrastructure with code

The journey of Comtech and Firefly started with one priority: provisioning infrastructure with code. But the ultimate goal? To achieve 100% codification of their assets, in order to:

  • More quickly filter their cloud asset inventory
  • Launch new and existing cloud environments at scale
  • Find and fix their configuration drifts in minutes, not months
  • Better manage and prepare for security and compliance audits

This meant leveraging capabilities for cloud asset inventory, cloud codification, drift detection, and policy and classification. Working to grow the Comtech team’s expertise in IaC and Terraform, Firefly also provided dedicated training (like walkthroughs for how to integrate Firefly with Gitlab, or how to convert a cloud formation asset over to Terraform.)

Why stay the course? The growing value of Firefly over time

More than a year after investing in Firefly, the Comtech team has seen successes ranging from huge cost savings, to improved cloud control, and greater Iac literacy. 

Ben Kunkel, Manager of Software Configuration Management at Comtech, explains:

‍“[At one point we were] migrating our build servers from an on-prem data center to AWS, using a feature that launches an Ami. But the Ami definition that we were using was not set up to remove the volumes. So we had 50 or 100 instances getting launched every day: each leaving its volumes behind, growing exponentially. That’s behind us now.”

Over time, Firefly has become Comtech’s cloud control co-pilot: boosting efficiency through an increasingly codified cloud footprint, and drastically reducing cloud waste.

For Comtech, that meant alerting them to an automation that was provisioning unneeded EBS volumes every time a server was provisioned, and then leaving the disk open. Firefly was able to quickly deprovision unneeded snapshots, and save Comtech over $180,000. 

What’s next for Comtech and Firefly?

With innovation at the core of what drives their business, Comtech’s continued partnership with Firefly will only strengthen their ability to make IaC and total cloud control key drivers of future growth and competitive differentiation.

‍“I don't think we have 100 people that are worried about Infrastructure as Code today, but it’s absolutely where we're headed. Right now, we have a dozen people that really benefit from training [on IaC and Firefly], and I’m sure we’ll see that grow.”  

‍-Ben Kunkel

As the focus on IaC grows (and its value continues to be proven), the Comtech team recognizes the unique and powerful capabilities of a solution like Firefly: one that’s not just a leader in revolutionizing DevOps efficiency, but a one-of-a-kind automation tool that caters to the complete lifecycle of cloud asset management: from provisioning, to management, drift detection, and policy enforcement.

Describing this kind of DevOps magic in his own words, Paul Hohberg put it simply and succinctly: “Nobody else out there is doing what Firefly can do."