Case Study: Starbucks achieves scalable infrastructure automation with HashiCorp Terraform and Vault

Terraform at Starbucks Infrastructure as Code for Software Engineers

Starbucks, working with HashiCorp Terraform and Vault, needed a better way to manage rapidly growing cloud infrastructure across many clusters and environments. As its cloud foundation services platform expanded, the team ran into too many repositories, inconsistent “snowflake” infrastructure, and risky manual rollout processes that consumed engineers’ time and created drift between environments.

HashiCorp helped Starbucks evolve from modular Terraform repositories to a more standardized, pipeline-driven infrastructure model with reusable modules, prescriptive deployment configs, automated plans/applies, and built-in testing and approvals. The new approach improved consistency across environments, reduced repository sprawl, enabled safer and more automated rollouts, and freed engineers from repetitive operational work so they could focus on higher-value development.

Starbucks

Mike Gee

Lead Engineer