The cloud brings great opportunities and great trials. Cloud complexity is challenging to say the least, leading to slower innovation and greater risk and waste. What is needed is a unified approach to managing infrastructure and security across the lifecycle of a hybrid cloud. For today’s blog, let’s explore the challenges we currently face—and the opportunities that lie ahead, if we take careful and strategic steps forward.
Roughly 52% of organizations rank multi/hybrid cloud complexity among their top three infrastructure cloud-management challenges and 73% report their platform engineering team and security personnel do not work as a unified function. This is according to the 2025 Cloud Complexity Report from HashiCorp, an IBM Co.
So, what then is the next step? How can we take complexity out of the cloud? Do we need to consider unified lifecycle management? Let’s take a peek behind the curtain for a minute.
Unified Lifecycle Management
About 51% of organizations say better visibility and monitoring of multi-hybrid cloud usage is a benefit from using a unified lifecycle-management platform. Also, 56% of transformative organizations are prioritizing improving AI (artificial intelligence)-driven automation to ensure cloud success in the next 12 months.
This is precisely the conversation I was having recently with Michelle Pellegrin, IBM’s VP and global managing director for Microsoft. She shared with me on The Peggy Smedley Show HashiCorp’s integration into IBM strengthens the Microsoft-IBM partnership and how they are working together to simplify provisioning and governance at scale.
“Bringing HashiCorp into IBM really strengthens the joint work we are already doing with Microsoft. We are giving customers a unified approach to managing cloud infrastructure,” says Pellegrin. “The shared vision we have with Microsoft is to enable the enterprise to operate in a multi-cloud world with security automation built in from day one. So together we are focused on helping clients modernize faster while reducing their risk and complexity.”
A Look at Hi-Rez Studios
Perhaps one of the best ways to explore the value this can bring is by looking at a client’s success story. Let’s journey to Hi-Rez Studios, located just outside of Atlanta, Ga. Here you will find a company that develops free-to-play action games for major gaming platforms.
Up through 2018, Hi-Rez Studios ran its core game platform on-premises and at co-location facilities. But it faced a challenge. It needed to achieve scalability for Rogue Company, a cross-platform, arena-style action shooter. The company had to scale beyond what it could achieve by manually deploying and managing its own servers.
To achieve these objectives, Hi-Rez Studios moved its core platform to Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure SQL, using Kafka for messaging, HashiCorp Terraform for deployment, and GitHub for source control and collaboration. Since then, Hi-Rez Studios has adopted several additional Azure services, open-source solutions, and HashiCorp tools—giving the company a scalable DevOps environment that is benefiting both the company’s centralized back-end services team and its portfolio of game studios.
Alongside its initial use of Terraform, the Backend Services Team adopted HashiCorp Vault for secrets management—such as providing controlled access to the cryptographic keys needed to setup a new Azure Kubernetes Service cluster. Following Terraform and Vault, Hi-Rez Studios deployed HashiCorp Consul for service discovery and networking. Hi-Rez Studios also adopted HashiCorp Packer, which enables the creation of identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.
The result is Hi-Rez Studios released Rogue Company into open beta in October 2020. The company’s Gen-2 architecture based on Azure, GitHub, open source, and the HashiCorp suite helped pave the way for the success of Rogue Company, delivering the scalability needed to support 15 million players within the first two months—followed by more than 20 million people since its introduction in 2020.
In my interview with Pellegrin, she shares how Hi-Rez Studios achieved some dramatic improvements in scalability and developer velocity without sacrificing their performance or stability.
In the future, the company plans to continue relying on the technology partners that helped it get to where it is today.
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