Case Study: Google Cloud simplifies large-scale infrastructure management with HashiCorp Terraform

The Workflow Google Engineers Use For Terraform Plan-And-Applies, And Hear How The Company Migrated From Terraform 0.11 To 0.12

Google Cloud needed a reliable way to manage infrastructure across both on-premises environments and Google Cloud at massive scale, while keeping thousands of engineers aligned on a single workflow. The company used HashiCorp Terraform as its infrastructure-as-code tool, along with Google Cloud Storage as the backend, to support collaborative plan-and-apply workflows and reduce risk during platform upgrades.

HashiCorp helped Google Cloud standardize Terraform usage with a sandboxed, centrally controlled setup, trusted providers, and a single-version policy in its monorepo. Google Cloud also used automated compatibility checks to safely migrate from Terraform 0.11 to 0.12, rolling out changes in stages across development, automation, and production. The result was a successful company-wide upgrade completed over several months, involving more than 10,000 human-hours across four teams, while Terraform adoption at Google Cloud grew by 404% year over year.

Google Cloud

Seth Vargo

Developer Advocate