About AppsFlyer
Founded in 2011, AppsFlyer is a global leader in marketing measurement, analytics, and engagement that helps more than 80k companies build better products, create exceptional experiences, and preserve customer privacy. Their mobile attribution and analytics helps marketers, ad agencies, and app creators measure and optimize their campaigns to make better decisions daily, protect their ad spend from fraud, and fuel their own data-driven marketing innovations.
The Challenge
Being one of the largest  consumers of AWS in EMEA, AppsFlyer's cloud infrastructure is mission critical. Yet, cloud at this scale comes with formidable management challenges: ever-changing infrastructure, unknown or unmanaged resources, and infrastructure configuration drifts. Eliran Bivas and his team were determined to get a better grasp of their infrastructure and its (third-party) resources, to make sure that AppsFlyer continues to deliver uncompromised value to its customers and partners.
One of the challenges that concerned the team was "the challenge of the unknown". Eliran and his team invested significant efforts to ensure that nothing gets past them. Still, they wanted to implement a simple solution to automate the process and ensure quality, without investing previous engineering time.
To deliver innovation and quickly conform with industry best practices, Appsflyer’s team was looking to maintain a fully Infrastructure-as-code managed and codified cloud.
Using Firefly’s Cloud Asset Management
Eliran and his team tried out Firefly and were immediately impressed by how quickly they could gain visibility of their entire cloud deployment and the current state of each resource. After the initial process of discovering and understanding the status of their IaC coverage, the team began to scan their infrastructure for drifts and unmanaged resources to remediate them. They found what was once a substantial effort and heavy lift, was a surprisingly simple and rapid process with Firefly. AppsFlyer enforced its cloud management policy and detected violations that would prevent them from meeting best practices. Moreover, to ensure reliable production operations, AppsFlyer leveraged Firefly to analyze the implications of any changes or implementations to other existing cloud resources.
- Full Visibility on Appsflyer Infrastructure
With the full infrastructure inventoried by Firefly, Appsflyer can get an overview of all their cloud assets, show statuses and progressions to management, find and codify unmanaged resources and fix underutilizations. ‍ - Codification of Security-Groups
By using the codification feature, Appsflyer is able to automatically codify security groups and manage the security-group changes via CI/CD pipeline, enforcing policy-base rules to prevent unwanted changes to be deployed on the cloud (such as adding new CIDR ranges). - Governance of New Unmanaged Assets
In order to maintain their cloud in the desired state, Eliran and his team decided that all newly deployed assets should be managed with IaC. Firefly enables Appsflyer to uncover new resources that were deployed manually, either by someone from the team or by a 3rd party tool (such as CSPM), turn them into codified assets, and understand what led to the creation of this asset. With Firefly, Eliran can make sure that all newly created assets are either managed or turned to managed immediately.
The Result
Besides giving Appsflyer full visibility of their cloud footprint, Firefly enables Appsflyer’s team to keep their cloud aligned with its desired state, by codifying new and existing assets, alerting on deviations from best practices and policies, and enforcing policies. By doing so, AppsFlyer increased its business velocity, while continuing to deliver uncompromised value to its customers and partners, through a robust SLA, performance, security, and privacy, while optimizing resources and costs.
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AppsFlyer's Ayelet de-Roos spoke at GitOps Con Europe explaining their entire approach. Watch it here.