Sportradar’s journey from Cloudformation to Terraform in a few clicks with Firefly

About

Founded in 2001, Sportradar is a leading global sports technology company creating immersive experiences for sports fans and bettors. Positioned at the intersection of the sports, media, and betting industries, Sportradar provides sports federations, news media, consumer platforms, and sports betting operators with a range of solutions to help grow their business. As a trusted partner of organizations like the NBA, NHL, MLB, NASCAR, UEFA, FIFA, Bundesliga, ICC, and ITF, Sportradar covers close to 1 million events annually across all major sports.

The Challenge

Sportradar primarily used AWS CloudFormation to provision their infrastructure. Sportradar runs on a multi-cloud environment using all of the major cloud providers. Recently, they decided to consolidate a majority of their workloads into AWS. They realized the need to switch to an IaC framework that can support multiple cloud providers and has a large community backing it, such as Terraform, for infrastructure management. The challenge the team faced was converting infrastructure configurations from CloudFormation into Terraform, which is often a very time-consuming process.

The Solution

Sportradar discovered Firefly at Kubecon Europe 2022 in Valencia, where they were intrigued by a demo of Firefly's infrastructure management capabilities. Firefly’s infrastructure-as-code (IaC) migration feature allowed Sportradar to easily convert resources from CloudFormation to Terraform in just a few clicks.

The Results: Increased Efficiency and Productivity

Using Firefly, Sportradar was able to reduce the time required for migration tasks by 70-80%. This allowed the engineering teams to focus on solving complex problems and contributed to removing repetitive, mundane tasks.

In addition to using Firefly for IaC migration, Sportradar found Firefly’s inventory capability valuable for product teams to have an overview of their resources.

Conclusion

Firefly proved to be an invaluable asset for Sportradar in transitioning from CloudFormation to Terraform. With Firefly's IaC migration capabilities, Sportradar streamlined their infrastructure management, saved significant time, and enabled their engineering teams to focus on innovation and tackling bigger challenges.

In the words of David Mohar:

"The value Firefly brings us is allowing us to inspect configurations and effortlessly migrate resources from one IaC tool to another. This accelerates the entire process and streamlines our infrastructure management. With the time we save, we usually use that extra time to focus on the bigger issues that we see. And sometimes we take the opportunity to just develop new things."