LiveEO: From Terraform Cloud to GitOps-Driven Infrastructure

Company Snapshot

LiveEO builds AI-powered satellite analytics for infrastructure monitoring. Around 150 engineers and specialists process massive volumes of geospatial data across cloud environments, turning satellite imagery into actionable insights for utilities, railways, and energy companies. Their infrastructure is compute-heavy, data-intensive, and constantly evolving.

This is a team that thinks in code. They don't need hand-holding on Terraform—they need a platform that integrates seamlessly into their GitOps workflows while enforcing governance automatically.

The Challenge: Terraform Cloud Hit Its Ceiling

LiveEO initially adopted Terraform Cloud as its infrastructure management platform. While it served the team well in the early stages, several challenges emerged as the company and its cloud footprint grew.

Costs increased as infrastructure usage expanded. Terraform Cloud's resource-based pricing became increasingly significant as usage grew.

LiveEO already had full Git integration with Terraform Cloud. As its infrastructure matured, the team looked for a platform that could bring governance, policy enforcement, drift detection, and managed state together around its existing Git-based workflows.

Governance required additional tooling. Enforcing organizational policies consistently across Terraform workspaces required workarounds and manual reviews instead of being embedded directly into the deployment process.

The goal was to strengthen infrastructure governance and operational visibility while allowing engineers to continue working through their existing Git-based development workflow.

The Solution: StackGuardian as the GitOps Backbone

LiveEO migrated from Terraform Cloud to StackGuardian to unify its infrastructure delivery around Git-native workflows with built-in governance. The rollout followed a phased approach.

Phase 1: Terraform Cloud Migration & Pipeline Integration

To accelerate the migration, LiveEO leveraged StackGuardian's Terraform Migrator, automating the migration of approximately 30 Terraform Cloud workspaces. The migrator extracted workspace configuration, Git repository references, and Terraform state before automatically generating StackGuardian workflows and state files.

The migration was executed in phases, starting with test environments before moving production workloads, significantly reducing manual effort and minimizing migration risk.

At the same time, StackGuardian integrated directly into LiveEO's existing CI/CD pipelines. No pipeline rewrites were required. Engineers continued working within their existing Git-based processes while StackGuardian added policy enforcement, drift detection, and managed state as automated capabilities.

Phase 2: Policy-as-Code Enforcement

LiveEO defined organizational policies once—including tagging standards, IAM constraints, and cost guardrails—and StackGuardian enforced them automatically during every Terraform plan.

Instead of relying solely on manual reviews, engineers receive immediate feedback when deployments violate organizational policies, while approval workflows remain available where required before infrastructure changes are applied.

Phase 3: Standardized Infrastructure Execution

Every Terraform execution now runs within a standardized managed environment.

Terraform state is encrypted, versioned, and automatically locked without requiring customers to maintain DynamoDB lock tables or manually manage backend infrastructure. Every deployment follows the same repeatable process regardless of team or project.

Results

Key Outcomes

• Accelerated migration from Terraform Cloud. Approximately 30 Terraform Cloud workspaces were migrated with significantly less manual effort using StackGuardian's Terraform Migrator.
• Streamlined governance. Engineers continue deploying through their existing Git-based workflow while policy evaluation and approval controls are integrated into the deployment process.
• Built-in governance. Policy enforcement is automated and consistent across every deployment.
• Reduced operational overhead. Managed Terraform state, automated locking, and standardized execution eliminate manual infrastructure management tasks.
• Complete operational visibility. Continuous infrastructure monitoring provides visibility across AWS Config, CloudWatch, Coralogix, and other operational sources.
• Audit-ready by default. Every deployment is linked to a Git commit, policy evaluation, execution record, and approval history.

Why It Fits LiveEO's DNA

LiveEO processes petabytes of satellite data across cloud environments. Their engineering teams focus on machine learning and geospatial analytics—not infrastructure administration.

StackGuardian allows the platform team to define governance once while developers continue working naturally through Git. The platform also provides complete infrastructure monitoring, including visibility from AWS Config, CloudWatch, Coralogix, and other operational sources. Infrastructure changes are validated and monitored within the same operational workflow, giving teams greater visibility while reducing manual infrastructure management.

For a company running compute-intensive AI workloads, reducing infrastructure friction directly translates into more engineering capacity for innovation.

One thing we really liked about StackGuardian is the collaboration. Bugs, when reported, were quickly actioned upon, and feature requests were also taken into consideration.

LiveEO Team

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Looking Forward

Following the successful migration from Terraform Cloud, LiveEO plans to expand StackGuardian adoption across additional engineering teams through self-service infrastructure blueprints.

The goal is to enable developers and ML engineers to provision compliant environments on demand using pre-approved templates, automated governance, and built-in cost controls—all while maintaining centralized visibility and compliance.

The successful migration of approximately 30 Terraform Cloud workspaces has also demonstrated the value of StackGuardian's Terraform Migrator as a repeatable approach for larger migration initiatives, making future infrastructure modernization projects faster, lower risk, and significantly less labor-intensive.