


To make things worse, these instructions were different depending on the client platform, which became a headache to maintain,” said Jordan Brown, Platform Engineering Manager.īeyond the issues with client setup and support overhead, the team had even greater concerns around security and risk. We had to write up a manual with almost 15 steps with screenshots, and it took 30 minutes for a user to get set up.

“Setting up OpenVPN was quite complicated and annoying. In addition, as the company hired new employees remotely, the team found that onboarding developers to their various AWS environments using their existing VPN was extremely burdensome and would not scale as they grew. With engineers distributed around the world, including the United States, Kenya, Ghana, Egypt, Ukraine, and Mexico, Homebase’s OpenVPN deployment was having trouble maintaining a reliable and performant connection for all of its global users. In early 2020, Homebase used OpenVPN to provide private access to their development environments and remote networks in AWS.Īs more of their development team began to work remotely, this implementation quickly fell short of the team’s needs. Homebase’s platform team has evolved their infrastructure several times, starting with Heroku and eventually transitioning to a fully containerized architecture on AWS that they run today. As remote work took hold in 2020, Homebase seized the opportunity to optimize their cloud security architecture and replace their existing VPN in order to provide more secure and more performant access to their global development teams. As a fast-growing startup, Homebase’s success has been due in part to a culture of relentless innovation to meet their employees’ and customers’ needs.
