Power Digital: 10x Reduction in Infrastructure Automation …

The result was a 10x reduction in infrastructure automation costs, significantly faster plan and apply deployment cycles, and a more resilient, scalable infrastructure that can easily onboard new clients.

Power Digital team members collaborating at a workstation in their office

The Challenge

A business growing faster than its infrastructure could handle

Power Digital’s rapid growth was a testament to its success, but it brought infrastructure challenges that began to slow further expansion, causing a Terralith: every client deployment living in one monolithic Terraform configuration, in a single state file, deployed through Terraform Cloud. The root module had passed 500 configuration files and grew with every client signed. At 43,000+ resources, Terraform Cloud wasn’t just slow, it was continually breaking with uncontrolled costs.

25-Minute Feedback Loops: A single plan took up to 25 minutes, and every change carried every client in its blast radius.
Over 50% of Runs Failed: Timeouts and out-of-memory crashes meant most Terraform runs ended in failure.
Client Onboarding Went Manual: Automation grew so unreliable the team fell back to ClickOps to provision new client infrastructure.
63 Engineer-Hours Lost Monthly: Spent waiting on plan/apply loops and debugging broken runs instead of shipping.

None of this was a design failure: the original system did its job until the business outgrew it. But with client onboarding, the primary revenue driver, running at the speed of the slowest Terraform run, the ceiling had become a business problem, not just an engineering one.

Resource growth pushing a single Terraform Cloud setup past its limits

63 hours of engineering time lost each month

What Masterpoint Did

A modernization project engineered so the business never paused

You can’t put a revenue-critical platform on hold to rebuild it. The engagement opened with Masterpoint’s deep-dive Infrastructure as Code audit: mapping the Terralith, interviewing stakeholders across teams, and defining the future state with Power Digital’s leadership.

Audit & Migration Plan

The audit of the Terralith and Terraform Cloud deployment became a detailed migration strategy with three hard constraints: minimal downtime, data integrity throughout, and security maintained or enhanced.

Build the New Platform in Parallel

A modular architecture on Spacelift ran alongside the existing Terralith. New clients onboarded straight onto it from day one, proving the system while existing clients stayed stable.

Decompose & Migrate

With the new platform proven, the Terralith was broken apart into standardized per-client deployments and every existing client migrated over, all 43,000+ resources, without issue.

Knowledge Transfer & Trainings for Power Digital's Engineering Team

Hands-on workshops, best-practices sessions, and troubleshooting guides mean Power Digital’s engineers own the platform: maintaining it, extending it, and shipping their own improvements.

Cutover

Terralith on Terraform Cloudexisting clients keep running, untouched

Modular platform on Spacelift + OpenTofunew clients onboard here from day one

Both systems ran in parallel: existing clients stayed stable on the Terralith while the new platform took over, so the business never stopped shipping.

Architecture

Monolithic Terraform becomes Isolated Client Stacks

Instead of one shared Terralith, each client deployment now lives in its own stack with isolated resources and state, connected through workspaces where the pieces need each other.

Blast radius shrank from “every client” to one fully isolated client. A change to one deployment can no longer ripple across the platform.
Feedback collapsed from 25 minutes to under 3 — an 8x improvement. Full init/plan/apply cycles for a client’s infrastructure complete in sub-3 minutes, sub-minute in some cases.
Standardization through reusable modules. Shared modules for common infrastructure components replaced repetitive copy-paste configuration, with dependencies explicitly defined — and the repository restructured around them, making the codebase navigable again and collaboration straightforward.

Platform & Tooling

Terraform Cloud → Spacelift & OpenTofu

Masterpoint recommended Spacelift, a leading TACOS (Terraform Automation and Collaboration Software) platform:

Pricing that matches usage. Terraform Cloud bills per resource, even when nothing changes — a client onboarded once and never updated is still billed. Spacelift bills on usage: annual costs dropped from ~$60,000 projected in 2024 to under $6,000, a gap that widens with every client added.
Guardrails as code. Operational and security policies enforced in the platform itself through Open Policy Agent.
GitOps. Granular, automated control over stacks and deployments — we manage Spacelift with Spacelift via Infrastructure as Code.

The same migration moved every resource from Terraform to OpenTofu, its open-source successor:

Licensing flexibility. No exposure to future Terraform license changes or the legal questions that come with them.
No vendor lock-in. Open source under the Linux Foundation, with vendor-neutral governance and a fast-growing contributor ecosystem.

All 43,000+ resources were smoothly migrated without downtime or incident.

The Outcomes

Business Impact

Annual automation costs
Before~$60,000 projected in 2024, growing with every client signed
After Engaging with MasterpointUnder $6,000
Plan & apply deployment cycles
BeforeUp to 25 minutes
After Engaging with MasterpointUnder 3 minutes — 8x faster
Run reliability
BeforeOver 50% failed
After Engaging with MasterpointFailures eliminated
New client onboarding
BeforeManual ClickOps
After Engaging with MasterpointFully automated
Blast radius of a change
BeforeEvery client
After Engaging with MasterpointOne client

Automation the Team Trusts

The out-of-memory crashes and timeouts are gone, and the operational toil went with them. Deploys turned from a scheduling event into a non-event the platform team barely thinks about.

100+ Clients in 60 Days

With the platform no longer gating onboarding, Power Digital brought on 100+ new clients in the first 60 days after migration.

Stronger Security & Compliance

Improved access control, better audit trails, and standardized security practices across every client deployment.

Disaster Recovery at Speed

Fast cycles, reliable automation, and hard isolation between clients mean the team can stand up replacement infrastructure quickly when an outage demands a nimble response.

Takeaways

Three questions worth asking about your own platform

Power Digital’s original system was not a design failure — it was a system the business outgrew. The evaluation that led to this project comes down to three questions:

Is it cost-effective?

For Power Digital the answer was “no”: staying put meant an exponentially more expensive Terraform Cloud plan with no guarantee of better performance.

Does it meet current needs?

Before the engagement with Masterpoint, this was also a “no” for Power Digital. A 50%+ run failure rate, 25-minute cycles, and hours of lost engineering time were real problems, not projections.

Can it meet future demands?

The one that matters most, and asking it early turns a forced migration into a deliberate one.

It’s okay if an answer is “no.” This story was an evolution to remove scaling limits — a good problem to have, because it means the business is growing. Masterpoint works with teams at exactly that point, solving the platform, infrastructure, and engineering problems that come with scale, every day.

👋 Curious if Masterpoint could help your team too? We partner with engineering organizations across the full spectrum — from unicorn startups to Fortune 500 enterprises — to deliver infrastructure systems and patterns that truly scale. Get in touch and we'll walk through your environment, your roadmap, and see where we can help — or download this case study as a PDF to share with your team.

Power Digital: 10x Reduction in Infrastructure Automation Costs, 8x Faster Client Onboarding