How does Tokyo Gas balance developer autonomy with security when enabling self-service infrastructure?

Tokyo Gas started with low-risk infrastructure components like environment variables that application developers frequently modify. For higher-risk operations like secrets management, the platform team still maintains control, acknowledging the ongoing challenge of balancing efficiency with security risk as they expand self-service capabilities.

What was the catalyst for Tokyo Gas building an internal software development capability?

Energy market deregulation in Japan (electricity in 2016, gas in 2017) transformed energy companies from monopolies to competitive businesses where customers have choice. This shift made digital customer acquisition and experience critical, requiring rapid product development that traditional outsourcing models couldn't support.

Scaling Infrastructure with HCP Terraform at Tokyo Gas

Name: Scaling Infrastructure with HCP Terraform at Tokyo Gas
Uploaded: 2026-05-08T19:18:16-04:00
Duration: 12 min 56 s

HashiCorp

05/08/2026

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TL;DR

Tokyo Gas built an internal software development organization from zero engineers to support digital customer acquisition following energy market deregulation in Japan
The company adopted HCP Terraform to reduce operational overhead for a small platform team while scaling infrastructure and maintaining governance across growing services
A self-service model enables application developers to modify infrastructure code directly for environment variables, improving release agility without requiring platform team intervention
The organization plans to expand internalization of services while offloading non-core tasks like CI/CD management to HCP, allowing engineers to focus on business value creation

Building Internal Development Capability from Zero

Tokyo Gas, a 140-year-old traditional energy company, faced a critical business transformation following energy market deregulation in Japan. With electricity deregulation in 2016 and gas deregulation in 2017, customer acquisition through digital channels became essential for survival in a newly competitive market. The company launched an internal software development organization from scratch—starting with zero software engineers—to respond rapidly to changing customer needs. The Living Strategy Division Digital Product Promotion Group was established with a unique structure: business domain experts, engineers, and creative professionals working within the same organization rather than in traditional silos. This cross-functional approach enables the team to deliver customer value as a unified entity, developing and operating B2C products including MyTokyo Gas, a customer portal for managing gas and electricity accounts, checking usage costs, and managing loyalty points.

HCP Terraform Adoption and Self-Service Infrastructure

As the platform team grew to three engineers during the growth phase, operational overhead became a significant constraint. Managing CI/CD pipelines and investigating Terraform configurations consumed time that could be spent on higher-value activities. The team adopted HCP Terraform to offload non-core operational tasks, leveraging automated plan generation on pull requests and the rich UI to focus on essential infrastructure management. A key insight emerged from a one-on-one conversation with an application developer who had previously worked at organizations where development teams managed their own infrastructure with Terraform. This feedback catalyzed a self-service initiative, starting with environment variables—frequently modified during application releases—which application team members could now update directly through Terraform without platform team intervention. This approach improved agility while maintaining governance, though challenges remain around secrets management and balancing security with developer autonomy.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction and HashiConf Experience
1:12 - Tokyo Gas Company Background
2:50 - Market Deregulation and Digital Transformation
4:36 - Internal Development Organization Structure
6:34 - HCP Terraform Adoption Journey
8:03 - Self-Service Infrastructure Initiative
10:29 - Future Expansion and Focus Strategy

Key Quotes

3:36 "In such an era of rapid change, we want to provide value as soon as possible to our customers."
4:16 "What we are particularly particular about is that the members who have knowledge in business, the members who have knowledge in technology, and the members who have knowledge in creativity are in the same organization."
7:51 "There is also a rich UI, so we can concentrate on the infrastructure management that we really need."
8:24 "In the background of this person, there was a story that the development team was making infrastructure at Terraform."
12:32 "For non-core business such as CI and CD, we will use the HCP platform to offload more and more, and we want to focus on the core part of the business in the future."

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