Dev tools

Live SDKs:

Automating Terraform Provider Creation Cuts Costs by 8X and Accelerates Go-to-Market

---

epilot leveraged Speakeasy to generate Terraform providers from their OpenAPI spec, saving $220K in development costs and eliminating ongoing maintenance.

Company Info

• Company: epilot
• Industry: Enterprise SaaS
• Website: epilot.cloud 

Key Takeaways

• 8X reduction in expected cost of Terraform Provider ($220K cost saving)
• Generated from OpenAPI specs for a minimal learning curve
• No need to invest in hiring teams of specialist engineers — maintain focus on core product development

Automating Terraform Provider Creation Cuts Costs by 8X and Accelerates Go-to-Market

Prior to Speakeasy, epilot’s Solutions Engineering team needed to work with each customer manually to set up their epilot instance. Viljami Kuosmanen, epilot’s Head of Engineering, realized that epilot setup could be automated via their existing APIs, and that a language for configuring infrastructure already existed — Terraform.

The only piece they were missing was a Terraform provider. Terraform providers allow Terraform code to interact with an API. In epilot’s case, they could create Terraform configuration files that communicate with the epilot Terraform provider (and ultimately, the epilot API), to automate the setup/configuration process. This would make setting up a new customer in epilot as easy as running a single command.

Viljami recognized that building an entire suite of Terraform providers would require significant creation and maintenance cost however: in fact, their initial budget estimate was $250K per year to hire a dedicated team of Go engineers.

The Solution: OpenAPI-based Terraform Generation with Speakeasy

epilot are huge advocates of the OpenAPI framework. Viljami himself is the maintainer of several OpenAPI-based tools such as the OpenAPI backend project.

Internally, the epilot team uses their OpenAPI spec as the primary source of truth for their API development, automating as many workflows as possible.

All the epilot team had to do was add some simple annotations to their OpenAPI spec, describing the Terraform resources that they wanted to create:

Now, whenever the epilot team updates their OpenAPI specs, Speakeasy’s Github workflow automatically regenerates their Terraform providers, runs a suite of tests, and then publishes a new version to the registry. No maintenance work required!

The Results: New Use Cases And New Customers

The proof is in the provider: epilot’s Registered Terraform Providers 

Through the use of OpenAPI and Speakeasy, epilot was able to automate the creation of Terraform Providers, resulting in a massive acceleration of their roadmap at a fraction of the expected cost.