Case Study: Box achieves cloud agility and infrastructure consistency with HashiCorp Packer and Terraform

Box's journey to the cloud with HashiCorp Packer and Terraform

Box’s Productivity Engineering team needed a better way to support the company’s 300 engineers after years of running CI infrastructure on long-lived bare-metal servers. Host divergence was causing inconsistent test results, infrastructure changes were slow, and the team was dependent on other groups to provision and manage machines. Box turned to HashiCorp, using Packer and Terraform to modernize how it built and deployed infrastructure.

HashiCorp helped Box create an automated, version-controlled workflow for continuously building and verifying images with Packer, then deploying and recycling instances with Terraform across a hybrid cloud of OpenStack and AWS. Box also built internal abstractions on top of these tools to simplify use and add validation. The result was a much more agile infrastructure: Box moved from bare metal to the cloud in less than a year and now regularly refreshes its fleet, including nightly recycling of infrastructure to keep it in a known-good state.

Box

Nadeem Ahmad

Senior Software Engineer