ActiveFence Case Study

ActiveFence is supporting online platforms to protect against harm and malicious behavior. In today’s digital age, it’s a complex feat requiring a lot of tooling across many teams. As the company has grown, their reliance on management tools has also increased. They traditionally used basic git workflows, with code living in various places to get things done. ActiveFence chose env0 because of its ease of use, logging capabilities and the fact they would no longer need to “manage their management solution”.

Prior to using env0, ActiveFence developers would clone code to their laptop, make changes, commit it and then try to integrate it into their overall solution. This workflow led to many complications and, in the words of ActiveFence, it was hard to keep things “calibrated”. Their new solution not only allows them to build centrally, but it shows what changes were applied, when, and also provides extensive logging to better help with troubleshooting.

Another challenge ActiveFence faced was code drift. As a growing company that was moving fast, high-quality documentation of the infrastructure suffered. With env0, they now have a central console giving everyone visibility into what they apply, where and when. This centralization also removed the need to build locally, reducing collisions with other builds caused by simultaneous Git pushes.

ActiveFence had several workflows and pipelines, but it was tough to connect them together and to reuse pieces from one workflow in another. Code reuse was also harder because of the underlying permissions on their infrastructure. Now, with code centrally managed, using env0, they can reuse one object in many projects without worrying about collisions or permissions. Reuse, coupled with pretty plan/graphical diff, makes it super easy for ActiveFence developers to identify and reduce complications in their environment.

Virgin Media O2 Challenge

When a department delivered a POC, they previously needed to know how to use multiple tools to achieve success. They would initially have to create a GitLab project, get access to credentials to supply to the project, spin up a virtual environment somewhere, and even peer the new environment to other environments or the Internet. Once the environment had been created, there were other required post-deployment steps. This process was extensive, and had multiple challenges along the way.

Virgin Media O2 selected env0 to address several concerns:

Reduction in deployment times
Ease impact from technical debt
Protect from ‌service account compromises
Ease new department onboarding

Moving to a managed IaC management platform allowed them to address these concerns, and gain more control over their IaC deployments.

The env0 solution

Another big feature ActiveFence sought was the ability for developers to use a self-service portal. With the env0 access control system and templates, this is on the cards as an achievable future project.

As ActiveFence continues to fine tune their use of env0, their staff say they have only scratched the surface of all the capabilities it can offer. Each change they make saves time, and allows them to get their product out quicker, helping with the mission to support online platforms in protecting against harm and malicious behavior

Using env0, we now have the ability to provide an infrastructure to our developers, allowing me to focus on what’s important. I no longer have to manage the management solution.

Imri Zvik

Director of DevOps

The Benefit to Virgin Media O2

Using env0, Virgin Media O2 tamed the Wild West deployments, bringing them all under a simple to use interface. Virgin Media O2 has seen usage grow month-over-month, with multiple new teams eager to onboard the solution. They’ve reduced technical debt by using TTLs to remove unused environments, and they’ve addressed their security concerns by automating the generation and integration of service accounts.

In Virgin Media O2’s own words, they’ve created a “vending machine” of options for teams to quickly create environments that deliver, enabling the business to thrive and grow.

About env0

env0 provides an automated, collaborative remote-run workflows management for cloud deployments on Terraform, Terragrunt and custom flows. env0 enables users and teams to jointly govern cloud deployments with self-service capabilities. env0 provides visibility into GitOps workflows of infrastructure changes. Leverage our granular RBAC permissions and limit access to IaC execution (e.g “terraform apply”), on production and other critical cloud resources. Implement any policy or check you desire with the freedom of an open standard Open Policy Agent guardrails. env0 can also help you prevent drifts with centralized remote-runs processes.

Learn more about env0