About Ndustrial

Founded in 2011 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Ndustrial is focused on industrial optimization challenges. With the goal to enable companies to gain new levels of insight into their business processes and Energy Intensity and then optimize and transform them for sustained competitive advantages, Ndustrial serves a range of factories and industrial facilities around the world.

The Challenge

When starting his position at Ndustrial, Holden Omans quickly realized that it's not only the known complexities of his infrastructure that he should be worried about, but also the issues that the team is not aware of. Founded in 2011, Ndustrial© growth led to a fragmented and complicated cloud infrastructure that kept growing as the company grew. While some cloud resources were deployed in order, others weren't and were left untouched or unnoticed. Holden and his team wanted to gain back control over Ndustrial's cloud and discover all of the company’s cloud resources, to prevent further cases of Shadow IT or unnoticed misconfigurations in the infrastructure.

Using Firefly’s Cloud Asset Management 

With Firefly, Ndustrial was able to continue scaling their cloud with peace of mind, knowing that they have full control over their environments and get notified on any unwanted changes, as they occur. They connected their AWS accounts and Kubernetes clusters to Firefly’s unified solution that enables them to:

  1. Get a full inventory of multi-account and K8s environment
    When looking for a solution to get full visibility of all cloud assets, Ndustrial was looking for a solution that would enable them to see not only their AWS assets (a problem to which many solutions exist), but a visibility of their K8s clusters as well. With Firefly, Ndustrial can see all their cloud assets across a complex environment of multi-account and K8s clusters. 
  2. Eliminate discrepancies
    With Firefly, Ndustrial can find mismatches between their desired state of cloud and the actual state of cloud and rectify them immediately. For example, by using Firefly’s continuous Drift Detection capability, Ndustrial is alerted to any deviation from the infrastructure source of truth they stated in their Infrastructure-as-Code, see where the mismatch occurs and get the ideal suggestion and fix for it, which can be deployed directly to their Git repo. 
  3. Automatic codification to Terraform Cloud for new resources
    Firefly saves hundreds of developer hours for Ndustrial, by automatically codifying new or existing cloud assets to Terraform Cloud. According to Holden, there are several ways in which new resources are created that Firefly instantly turns into code - AWS GUI, Rancher and other 3rd party tools, and all are described as code in Terraform directly to the repo using Firefly. 
  4. Reduce cloud inefficiencies
    With Firefly, Ndustrial was able to find unused or inefficient resources that they were paying for unnecessarily. For example, unattached EBS volumes, XL EC2s or DBs, stopped EC2 instances, and more. 

The Result

Ndustrial’s team was able to save countless developer hours and improve efficiency in their processes with existing resources. Moreover, with Firefly’s continuous scanning and alert mechanism, Holden and his team have gained peace of mind over their cloud, knowing that each new resource is discovered and codified, making sure their cloud constantly maintains its desired state.