BT Group Reduces Deployment Time from Days to 10 Minutes with HashiCorp and AWS

BT Group is a leading provider of telecommunications in the UK. With its expansive footprint, the company had accumulated numerous data centers over its history, which incurred significant operational costs related to leasing, energy use, and maintenance. As part of a strategic initiative to optimize costs and improve efficiency, BT Group sought to reduce its legacy infrastructure and shift a majority of its operations to the cloud. The goal was to leverage the scalability and cost-efficiency of cloud infrastructure and reserve physical data centers for strategic use cases.

At the start of the project, the Networks unit of BT Group, responsible for building the software and infrastructure for its consumer EE TV product, operated from multiple on-premises data centers, one of which needed to close within a year. Ensuring uninterrupted TV services for customers during the transition was a critical concern. Additionally, BT Group wanted to minimize the impact on development teams, so they could focus on priorities like shipping new features and resolving issues.
 

BT Group needed to decide what to do with 70 applications spread across two of its data centers. But it wasn’t just the applications—there were also hundreds of test copies and QA copies to migrate. The company had some tough decisions to make, but choosing a cloud provider wasn’t one of them. “AWS is known for its scalable, secure infrastructure, and several teams already used AWS services, making it the obvious choice for this transition,” said Tom Davies, principal software engineer at BT Group. The team decided to migrate a significant portion of its applications—around 60 percent—to AWS.

Driven by the need to modernize infrastructure operations, enhance security, and improve deployment agility, BT Group turned to HashiCorp, an AWS Partner. HashiCorp offers a comprehensive suite of tools for infrastructure and security lifecycle management. “HashiCorp solutions—Terraform, Nomad, Consul, and Vault—helped us move seamlessly, allowing teams to focus on application development rather than the intricacies of cloud provisioning,” said Davies. The entire procurement process was managed through AWS Marketplace, which streamlined and simplified the experience.

Terraform automated provisioning and management across the infrastructure lifecycle on AWS, ensuring consistent deployment practices and reducing manual effort. Nomad was the central orchestration tool, facilitating seamless app deployment and scaling to optimize resource and operational efficiency. Consul provided essential connectivity features for cloud hosted applications like service discovery, health checks, and traffic routing. Meanwhile, Vault enhanced data protection and compliance to boost security posture throughout the migration by safeguarding API keys, passwords, and TLS certificates.

In parallel, BT Group used AWS Direct Connect and AWS Transit Gateway to facilitate seamless communication in a hybrid on-premises and cloud environment. These services ensured operational continuity and minimized disruption during the migration period. “The strategic use of HashiCorp tools with AWS services enabled us to achieve our migration goals efficiently while positioning BT Group for enhanced operational flexibility and cost savings,” said Davies.

The migration to AWS allowed BT Group to revolutionize its deployment processes. Previously, on-premises application deployments involved multiple teams. It took one to three days to provision servers and set up firewall rules. With HashiCorp tools, Terraform automated 90 percent of these tasks. This reduced deployment time from days to just 10 minutes, accelerating time-to-market for both migrated workloads and new projects.

The company achieved its goals of minimizing TV service disruptions and reducing work for its development teams. With standardized deployment templates, teams seamlessly adopted the new platform without the need for extensive code changes or learning new languages. Beyond operational improvements, BT Group estimated an 80% cost reduction from using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances for test and CI workloads in AWS reduced infrastructure costs substantially. 

The scalability and elasticity of AWS will be critical for handling spikes in demand during major events, while HashiCorp’s comprehensive toolset will continue to support BT Group’s infrastructure moving forward. “We couldn’t have done it without HashiCorp,” said Davies. “HashiCorp tools help us get optimal value from our AWS investment.”