PlayQ Accelerates Infrastructure Delivery with Harness IaCM and OpenTofu | Harness Case Study

How PlayQ Modernized Infrastructure as Code with Harness

PlayQ is a mobile gaming company known for delivering engaging, content-rich games to millions of players worldwide. With a small but highly capable engineering team, PlayQ relies heavily on cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes to support frequent updates and new game features.

As PlayQ’s infrastructure footprint grew, the team recognized the need for a more scalable, cost-effective, and flexible approach to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) , one that would enable faster delivery while maintaining strong security and governance practices.

Before adopting Harness, PlayQ managed its infrastructure using open-source Terraform. While this approach worked well initially, the team began to encounter limitations as usage scaled. Expanding Terraform Cloud would have introduced significant cost increases, while the lack of flexibility made it difficult to customize pipelines, workflows, and execution models to fit their needs. Managing infrastructure updates, particularly Kubernetes cluster changes, required increasing levels of coordination and time, creating operational friction for a lean team. In addition, PlayQ needed a more secure, GitOps-aligned approach to managing secrets across environments. The team required a solution that could be adopted quickly, remain fully self-service, and scale with their infrastructure without adding operational overhead.

Why Harness

PlayQ evaluated multiple infrastructure automation platforms, including Harness, Spacelift, and other Terraform-based solutions. Ultimately, they selected Harness Infrastructure as Code Management for several key reasons:

• Pipeline flexibility: Harness provided the ability to customize and evolve pipelines as infrastructure needs changed.
  
• Cost-effective scaling: The pricing model aligned better with PlayQ’s growth trajectory compared to Terraform Cloud.
  
• Developer experience: The UI, templating model, and workflow design made it easier for a small team to manage infrastructure confidently.
  
• Collaborative support: As an early IaCM customer, PlayQ benefited from close collaboration with Harness engineers, accelerating onboarding and adoption.
  

Importantly, PlayQ was able to implement Harness entirely in a self-service manner, with minimal services involvement, while still having access to expert guidance when needed.

Solution

With Harness IaCM, PlayQ centralized infrastructure provisioning and management using a GitOps-driven approach. Their implementation includes:

• Self-service IaC pipelines built from scratch using Harness
  
• GitOps-based workflows for infrastructure changes
  
• Secure secrets management using SOPS decryption
  
• Support for both Terraform and OpenTofu, enabling a gradual migration strategy

“Harness gave us a clear path forward with OpenTofu without forcing a disruptive migration”, the team noted, “We were able to support both tools side by side, standardize our workflows, and move at our own pace while keeping everything self-service.” Over time, PlayQ began transitioning away from Terraform toward OpenTofu, aligning with their preference for open, community-driven tooling. Today, the majority of their infrastructure runs on OpenTofu, with the remainder actively in migration.

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Results

By standardizing infrastructure workflows with Harness, PlayQ achieved meaningful improvements in speed and operational efficiency. 

“With Harness, all Terraform plans and applies run concurrently. Pushing upgrades to Kubernetes clusters is 4x faster than it used to take with Terraform Cloud” - John Maynard, Director of Platform Engineering

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The entire implementation of IaCM was completed as a fully self-service effort, with the PlayQ team independently configuring and managing pipelines, workspaces, and infrastructure workflows, including migrating Terraform state files as part of their transition to OpenTofu. This self-service model eliminated manual coordination and repetitive setup work, allowing engineers to focus on building and shipping game features rather than managing infrastructure tooling. For a small team, these gains translated into faster iteration cycles and greater confidence in making infrastructure changes.

Future Plans with Harness

Looking ahead, PlayQ plans to continue expanding its use of Harness as its infrastructure evolves. The team is increasing adoption of OpenTofu as its default infrastructure-as-code engine, exploring the Harness Module Registry to standardize and reuse infrastructure components, and continuing to refine GitOps workflows as infrastructure complexity grows. PlayQ is also planning on integrating Ansible for configuration management to further streamline and standardize post-provisioning workflows. As PlayQ scales, Harness IaCM provides a flexible, scalable foundation that supports growth without sacrificing simplicity or developer efficiency.