The PayPal cryptocurrency and digital asset organization (BCDC) relies on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The DevOps team uses Terraform, an open-source Infrastructure as Code framework. However, like many rapidly scaling companies with growing engineering teams, PayPal quickly ran into bottlenecks trying to keep up with the demand for provisioning infrastructure.
Given the explosive growth of crypto asset trading, they needed env0 to streamline their IaC deployments, and ensure developers made more efficient use of their costly cloud resources so they could improve their end-user experience.
The PayPal Challenge
PayPal’s BCDC CI/CD flow mirrors most tech teams, while following a Gitflow branch model, with semantic feature/develop/release/hotfix branches. They use Jenkins to orchestrate tests and push releases across three environments: dev, staging, and production. They use Datadog to monitor and GCP billing to gain insight into cost and payment history.
Paypal BCDC made the decision to adopt an IaC framework (i.e. Terraform) to address several key needs:
Required auditing of deployed resources.
Improved transparency and better communication between devs and DevOps.
Normalized environments that prevent drift between infrastructure code and cloud resources.
The ability to have both a history of changes as well as integrated release notes.
Moving to IaC and orchestration improved PayPal’s delivery capabilities. However, their demand for a flexible way to describe and deploy their environments meant that Terraform alone was not enough.
The env0 solution
With the rapid growth of the digital asset and currency space, the team at PayPal began to feel the limitations and challenges of existing IaC and declarative Orchestration tools. env0 provided greater agility, with increased flexibility enabling their teams to meet the demands of a rapidly growing business unit, including:
Zero Waste - Standard IaC frameworks provided little ability to manage unneeded environments. env0 delivered that capability to PayPal. According to Shaked Shauli, BCDC DevOps Lead at PayPal, “The greatest advantage of env0’s platform was TTL environments” and destroying developer environments automatically. The takeaway: R&D writes Terraform, and DevOps teams manage it. DevOps teams spend their time on delivering new features, and have no waste, and on-demand access to resources.
Enhanced Visibility - env0’s dashboard gives the entire PayPal BCDC team access to the same easy, convenient tools for working with Terraform and automation. Different team members develop infrastructure as well, and provide the final pull request for architecture and usability review and approval. Because of env0, every PR has already been tested, reducing the time required before needed enhancements make it to production. Gone are the days when a lack of visibility causes confusion or miscommunication.
Intuitive UX / UI - PayPal’s team found env0 to be far more intuitive than Jenkins or other custom scripting solutions and thus more usable for team members both inside and outside of theDevOps organization.
Compared to Jenkins or scripts, env0 is built specifically for IaC workflows and our team actually likes using it.
Shaked Shauli
DevOps Lead, PayPal
The PayPal Benefit
With env0, PayPal is able to get the visibility and control they need in their IaC deployments, and broaden developer and DevOps access to on-demand resources while also ensuring effective cost control by auto destruction of ephemeral cloud-based development resources..
PayPal credits env0 for enabling efficient use of multi-cloud infrastructure, while freeing up valuable DevOps time with a highly intuitive and usable interface compared to their Jenkins-based tooling.
Developers and PayPal management say env0 helps them increase environment visibility, control resources, and provides a unique historical view of the infrastructure required to support the demands of a thriving cryptocurrency and digital asset platform.
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.
