Case Study: Hootsuite achieves repeatable, immutable infrastructure and safer, faster server rebuilds with Ansible

HootSuite - Customer Case Study

HootSuite, a social media management platform used by more than 75% of Fortune 1000 companies, faced a fragile infrastructure where servers were snowflakes: rebuilds depended on limited documentation and memory, making automation and reliable deployments difficult. This lack of repeatability created risk and slow recovery when instances failed.

HootSuite adopted Ansible core across all servers, using playbooks stored in source control and Vagrant for local testing to make builds repeatable and immutable. The change eliminated long, error-prone rebuilds, increased developer and ops productivity through shared playbooks, raised the bus factor from one to many, revealed powerful orchestration capabilities, and set the team up to expand Ansible into app deployment and broader DevOps practices.

Hootsuite

Beier Cai

Director of Technology, HootSuite