Case Study: ActBlue achieves scalable, compliant infrastructure with HashiCorp Terraform

How Terraform Will Impact the 2018 US Elections

ActBlue, a fundraising platform for progressive political campaigns and nonprofits, needed to scale rapidly while managing a sprawling mix of manual and fragmented infrastructure across multiple providers. As donation volume surged, the team struggled with configuration drift, siloed knowledge, inconsistent processes, and the need to maintain PCI-compliant systems while supporting fast, reliable fundraising during a critical election period.

Using HashiCorp Terraform, ActBlue centralized infrastructure as code for key systems including its PCI-compliant credit card vault on AWS and its Fastly CDN configuration, while also improving orchestration across much of its environment. HashiCorp Terraform gave ActBlue better transparency, collaboration, code review, and multi-environment control, helping reduce manual changes and downtime, simplify audits and PCI compliance, and support growth to over $2 billion processed and 5.6 million donors.

ActBlue

Nicholas Klick

Lead Engineer