Case Study: Elsevier achieves fast, production-ready container orchestration with HashiCorp Nomad, Terraform, and Consul

Elsevier's container framework with Nomad, Terraform, and Consul

Elsevier, a global research and publishing company with hundreds of web services, 50 million users worldwide, and distributed development teams across 12 countries, needed a container platform that was simple enough for teams to run and operate on their own with little to no core infrastructure support. HashiCorp products including Nomad, Terraform, and Consul were evaluated to meet the need for a production-ready container framework that could fit Elsevier’s existing HashiCorp-based deployment practices and still allow for customization.

HashiCorp implemented a Nomad-based framework at Elsevier, built with Terraform and Consul plus custom Go services for automated scaling and job management. The solution enabled production-ready cluster provisioning in under four to four-and-a-half minutes, supported canary, rolling, and blue/green deployments with auto-revert, and added automated job and cluster scaling through Elsevier’s open-sourced Replicator daemon. This gave Elsevier a fast, resilient, fault-tolerant platform with minimal downtime and significantly faster deployments.

Elsevier

Eric Westfall

Principal Engineer