How Adaptavist Scaled to 700+ Environments While Slashing Operational Overhead

Background

Adaptavist is a global technology powerhouse and a Platinum Atlassian Partner, helping thousands of organizations from startups to Fortune 500s optimize their software development and digital workflows. As the "engine room" for the company’s internal innovation, Zbysek Mraz, Team Leader of Cloud Operations, manages a lean team of five that supports over 300 developers. His team is central to DevOps within the organization, making key decisions across AWS, GCP, and Azure, while overseeing everything from account vending to FinOps.

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Challenge: A Small Platform Team vs. 300 Developers

For years, Adaptavist relied on its previous cloud infrastructure platform as its Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) control plane. However, as the organization scaled toward managing 700+ environments, the platform began to buckle under technical and financial friction: 

• Operational Bottlenecks: Managing workspaces required tedious manual intervention and unreliable API/curl scripts, making configuration at scale nearly impossible.
• Visibility & Forecasting Gaps: The team lacked historical cost data and future forecasting for their cloud resources. Additionally, a sudden shift in the vendor’s pricing model forced the team to migrate to a new solution before credits vanished.
• The Skills Gap: Alternative solutions to their previous provider required significant workflow changes—such as replacing the Terraform binary with vendor-specific utility wrappers—which would have required retraining 300+ developers or hiring more platform engineers.
• Vendor Lock-in: Transitioning to OpenTofu was a strategic priority to avoid licensing risks, but they needed a platform that supported both legacy Terraform and the future of OpenTofu seamlessly.

Solution: A Seamless Shift to env zero

After a rigorous evaluation of the market—including open-source options like Terrakube and commercial alternatives—Adaptavist chose env zero. The decision rested on env zero’s ability

to provide a managed control plane that didn't force a total rewrite of their existing developer workflows.

Key Technical Highlights:

• Self-Hosted Agents on EKS: Adaptavist deployed env zero agents on their own Kubernetes clusters, allowing for massive autoscaling of runners while maintaining strict security and control over their infrastructure.
• Native Multi-IaC Support: Unlike the previous provider, env zero allowed the team to run Terraform, OpenTofu, and Ansible side-by-side, facilitating a risk-free migration to OpenTofu.
• GitLab Consolidation: As heavy GitLab users, the team utilized env zero’s deep integration to provide developers with clear feedback directly within Merge and Pull Requests.
• Governance without Friction: By implementing env zero’s Policy-as-Code (OPA) and OIDC integration, the team maintained backwards compatibility with their previous security standards without slowing down deployment.

Results: Migrating 700 Environments in 5 Months

By partnering with env zero, Adaptavist successfully executed an ambitious migration on a condensed timeline.

• Massive Scale, Lean Team: A team of only five engineers successfully migrated 700 environments (workspaces). Zbysek’s team completed their portion within the first 45 days.
• Zero Developer Retraining: Because env zero supports standard Terraform commands and familiar VCS workflows, Adaptavist’s 300+ developers didn't have to learn a new CLI or YAML syntax.
• Financial Security: The migration was completed before their previous contract expired, saving the company from significant overage costs and unpredictable resource-based pricing.
• Improved Governance: The team centralized policy, audit, and cost controls for current and future environments in env zero.

Next Steps

With the migration complete and the slate cleaned, Adaptavist is moving into the next phase of its infrastructure evolution. The team plans to:

1. Onboard New Business Units: Transitioning remaining US-based teams and those using legacy CDK or CloudFormation templates into the env zero platform.
   
2. Standardize Self-Service: Developing internal guides and templates that empower developers to spin up pre-approved environments from scratch without CloudOps' intervention.
3. Expand Partnership: Leveraging their success to help Adaptavist’s customers migrate away from rigid IaC platforms and adopt modern, flexible solutions like env zero.