Case Study: TV4's Migration from Terraform Cloud to Scalr

Who Are TV4 and MTV3?

TV4 and MTV3 are Sweden and Finland's largest commercial television channels, respectively. In addition to producing original programming and operating television channels, they offer two digital services each in the form of streaming services and news sites.

What Does TV4's Terraform Stack Look Like?

The TV4 team manages the following providers with Terraform: AWS, GitHub, Akamai, Grafana, Kubernetes, and Helm. They also use AzureAD for SSO and SCIM provisioning.

TV4 migrated away from Terraform Cloud primarily due to cost concerns but also due to lackluster service performance.

Why Did Terraform Cloud's Pricing Push TV4 to Look Elsewhere?

Like a lot of other Terraform Cloud users, TV4 was caught off guard by the changes at HashiCorp, including the announced pricing changes. So they decided to move their 1,000 workspaces and 50,000 resources to a more cost-effective solution.

The deeper issue isn't just TFC's RUM pricing, where every managed resource adds to the bill no matter whether anything happened. Concurrency-based pricing, which some alternatives use, has its own problem: you pay for a fixed number of parallel run slots whether or not you use them. Too few and engineers queue during releases. Too many and you're renting idle capacity. Scalr's usage-based pricing only charges for runs that actually executed, which is what made the math work for an estate the size of TV4's.

How Did TV4 Validate Scalr Before Committing?

TV4's main requirement was an alternative to Terraform Cloud that wouldn't upend the day-to-day work of their users. They wanted the switch to be invisible once the migration was done. Workflow continuity like this is one of the first things to check when selecting a Terraform Cloud alternative.

Key similarities that made Scalr a good fit:

• Ability to use the native Terraform CLI
• A Scalr workspace is the equivalent of a Terraform Cloud workspace
• A Scalr environment is very similar to a Terraform Cloud organization
• Scalr can be fully automated through their Terraform provider

TV4 verified the POC by migrating all of their platform team's workspaces a week ahead of time and dogfooding the service.

How Did TV4 Execute the Migration From Terraform Cloud to Scalr?

TV4 had to determine the best migration method:

1. Allow application teams to migrate their own workspaces by giving them a deadline.
2. Go with the "big-bang" approach and completely automate it with a quick cutover.

They went with the big-bang approach, since the POC testing had given them confidence. The app teams were bought in. TV4 took the existing Scalr migration module and rewrote it fully in Python, which they were more comfortable with. Their version is available on GitHub.

When it was time to migrate, they froze infrastructure deployments for around 2 hours to perform the migration. It could have been faster with async/multithreading, but they figured it was an unnecessary optimization for a one-off task.

They ran into a few minor issues along the way around pagination, some IAM roles that were missing, and having to remove old TFC lockfiles, but they sorted all of these out quickly.

Overall, the migration went really well, and since everyone onboarded, the app teams have said more than once that the Scalr interface feels more responsive and modern than TFC.

What Improved for TV4 After Moving to Scalr?

Other than a better UI experience, TV4 also experienced:

• Performance Improvements: Terraform Cloud was frustratingly slow at times when starting jobs after changes were pushed to GitHub, whereas Scalr has consistently been responsive and has started runs within a few seconds.
• Pricing: They are not locked into any billing plan. They decided to start month-to-month to make sure they were happy with the choice and then migrated to an annual plan for larger discounts when they were ready.
• Organizational Structure: The main benefit from breaking the one large Terraform Cloud organization into multiple Scalr environments was that it's much easier to assign credentials to workspaces and manage automation such as Slack notifications when changes are made to production workspaces.
• Helicopter Views: The admin team now has more oversight into overall operations through the run dashboard at the account scope, making it easier to identify issues in the pipeline.

Does TV4 Still Prefer Scalr Over Terraform Cloud a Year Later?

It's been over a year since TV4 migrated away from Terraform Cloud. One more reason they're glad they did: TFC still has no OpenTofu support. Given how fast OpenTofu has been shipping new features, that's reason enough on its own.

TV4 continues to recommend Scalr as an alternative. Other highlights from the first year:

• Support Quality: At TFC, it was difficult to get ahold of staff for feature requests. HashiCorp was also not particularly communicative during outages. Scalr's team has been very easy to get in touch with and responsive to feature requests and feedback.
• OpenTofu Support: Native OpenTofu support in Scalr was an important advantage as the OpenTofu ecosystem matured.

"Scalr is much faster than Terraform Cloud, and executes runs with almost no latency." - David Stevens, DevOps Engineer @ TV4

What Are the Key Takeaways From TV4's Migration?

Metric	Detail
Workspaces Migrated	1,000
Resources Managed	50,000
Migration Downtime	~2 hours
Migration Approach	Big-bang, fully automated via Python script
Primary Drivers	Cost reduction, performance improvement
Result	Faster runs, better pricing, improved organizational structure