Basis Technologies and Firefly: Joining forces against infrastructure sprawl

Basis Technologies is a global provider of software and services for automating and optimizing digital advertising, including programmatic media buying, search, and social. The company, founded in 2001, (formerly known as Centro), focuses on streamlining workflows for marketers through automation and data-driven insights.

Basis Technologies is a business that believes in growing fast to stay ahead of an ever-changing industry, with a goal of solving the ad tech industry’s complexity. 

And with innovation, complexity, and agility top of mind, it makes sense that Basis chose to partner with Firefly. The result? A better, more efficient way to manage and govern their infrastructure.

Why infrastructure sprawl and governance blindspots made cloud asset management a necessity

In early 2023, Basis Technologies’ infrastructure team was confronted by a hard truth: cloud resources were growing out of control, and spreading like wildfire across different services, accounts, and regions without any real oversight or management.

  • The team was running on AWS and using Terraform to manage almost all their infrastructure, but had no holistic overview of the state of their assets. 
  • They struggled with visibility and were quickly losing sight of what was actually running in their environments: risking rogue instances, security concerns, orphaned volumes, and cost spikes. 
  • Configuration drifts and unmanaged resources lurked everywhere. 
  • And with new resources popping up left and right, maintaining a consistent security posture started to feel impossible. 

Like many organizations are today, Basis Technologies was confronted with the dark side of the cloud's "easy scaling" promise: eventual chaos, if not managed right. Not understanding the extent of their infrastructure sprawl, or how to control it, had the team feeling uneasy.

Choosing Firefly was about making sure the team had a better grasp on their underlying infrastructure (especially with infrastructure that tended to churn a lot in pre-production, or with legacy infrastructure that went untouched and got stale over time.)

Right away, Firefly allowed the Basis Technologies team to see immediate value: from state-to-asset visibility, Terraform version sprawl, active drift management, and management (and removal) of legacy infrastructure. 

After seeing that instant time-to-value with Firefly, and a time-to-ramp that was next to nothing, what started as a 3-month contract with Firefly became a 6-month extension, and then a year-long partnership. Here’s why.

Value over time: Empowering Basis Technologies to control and govern their infrastructure with Firefly

For Basis Technologies, insufficient cloud governance was the catalyst driving the team to get their house in order, including uncovering lack of proper inventory of IaC, and untangling infrastructure sprawl. 

“That's the immediate value we got from Firefly: identifying resources. Say we're doing a wholesale evaluation of all of our Terraform, which we currently are. What version is it on? What state is it in? Can we upgrade it? How do we do that safely? How do we reapply it to get all of the resources in alignment? Being able to have those kinds of answers, especially as we are operationalizing the Terraform lifecycle internally, is what drew me to Firefly.”

‍- Brian Andersen, Manager of Production Operations at Basis Technologies
‍

Beyond complete cloud visibility, they’ve also seen upwards of $34,000 in annual savings for cloud waste. (That represents an 83% cost reduction, and saves Basis even more than what they spent on their initial Firefly investment.)

Still, that’s only part of the story for Firefly and Basis. There was also a company mandate on IaC standardization and clean-up, and an ultimate goal of true IaC mastery. 

Firefly offered Basis Technologies a singular platform to:
‍

✓ See and get precise control over their asset inventory (i.e. query for specific resources, or see what’s in a specific state file)

✓ Drive their mismanaged infrastructure, IaC cleansing and future state plans to standardize Terraform adoption

✓ Implement cloud policies and governance with ease


At the three-month mark, Firefly was already a game-changer for cloud visibility across the team, when the solution helped Basis Technologies avoid a production outage.

‍"We did a PR that changed a tag on a resource, and it caused instances to start hard crashing. Firefly notified us of the drift issue, so we could act and address it right away. It’s just one example, but we're all in on Firefly now, and we’re seeing huge value." 

‍-Brian Andersen
‍

Over time, the value of Firefly for the Basis Technologies team only continued to grow. 

And even among junior engineers, Basis Technology team members are now easily able to troubleshoot issues like critical security drifts, on the fly, without much direction. That means a more empowered, efficient team and a better managed and better governed cloud. But what’s next? 

“It's great to release something and get it out there, but that needs to be maintained. And that's where our team has fallen short in the past when it comes to regular upgrade cycles and moving things through the pipeline. We don’t want to wait until something is catastrophically broken. We want to establish a regular cadence where we're constantly moving the lowest denominator forward in a controlled manner.”

‍-Jeff Smith, Sr. Director of Cloud Operations, Basis Technologies
‍

With Firefly, Basis Technologies is equipped with the right tools to support this evolution: going from the visibility basics, to true IaC mastery, and ultimately — to a fully controlled cloud.