How CloudDrove Manages 60+ Repos Without Jira

About CloudDrove

CloudDrove is a cloud infrastructure company that builds and maintains open-source Terraform modules alongside internal projects. Their portfolio spans over 60 repositories, and their engineering team of 30+ developers contributes across both open-source and private codebases daily.

If you have used Terraform modules on the registry, there is a good chance you have come across CloudDrove's work. Their modules are widely adopted, well-maintained, and actively developed — which means a lot of GitHub activity to manage.

The Problem: Two Systems, Zero Sync

Like many engineering teams, CloudDrove started with Jira because it seemed like the obvious choice for project management. But the cracks appeared quickly.

Every issue created in GitHub needed a corresponding ticket in Jira. Assignments had to be mirrored in both places. When a developer closed an issue via a pull request in GitHub, someone still had to go update the Jira ticket manually. The two systems were constantly drifting apart.

The per-seat licensing cost added up too. With 30+ engineers, even the standard Jira plan meant thousands of dollars per year for a tool that their developers actively tried to avoid. Engineers lived in GitHub — that is where the code reviews happened, where the CI ran, where the issues were discussed. Jira was just a reporting layer that nobody wanted to maintain.

The result was predictable: Jira data was always stale, managers could not trust the boards, and the team spent more time managing the tool than getting value from it.

The Switch: GitHub + Octoboard

CloudDrove made the decision to consolidate everything into GitHub. Issues, project boards, milestones — all native GitHub features that their team was already using for day-to-day development.

The missing piece was visibility. GitHub does not give you a dashboard that spans 60+ repos. It does not show you delivery trends, stale work, or engineering metrics. For an engineering lead trying to report progress to stakeholders, GitHub alone was not enough.

That is where Octoboard came in. CloudDrove connected their GitHub organization to Octoboard, and within minutes they had a live dashboard showing delivery progress across every repo, cycle time breakdowns, risk signals for stale PRs and at-risk milestones, and DORA metrics that updated automatically.

The Results

The impact was immediate and measurable:

$0/month in PM tool costs. No more per-seat Jira licensing. GitHub Issues and Projects are free, and Octoboard provides the dashboard layer at no additional cost.

Zero manual syncing. There is no second system to keep up to date. When a developer creates an issue, assigns it, opens a PR, and merges it — the data flows automatically. Nothing to duplicate, nothing to reconcile.

Real-time delivery metrics. Engineering leads can see at a glance how each project is progressing, which PRs are stale, which milestones are at risk, and how the team's delivery metrics are trending over time.

5-minute setup. Connecting the GitHub org to Octoboard took minutes, not days. There was no migration project, no Jira export/import, no workflow reconfiguration. They just connected and started seeing their data.

By the Numbers

60+ repositories tracked across open-source and internal projects.
30+ engineers using GitHub as their single source of truth.
5 minutes from connecting GitHub to having a live dashboard.
$0/month in project management tooling costs.

Key Takeaway

CloudDrove's story is not unique. Many engineering teams are stuck paying for PM tools that duplicate what GitHub already does, then spending hours keeping the two systems in sync. The alternative is simpler than most people think: use GitHub for what it is already good at, and add Octoboard for the visibility layer that GitHub lacks.

If your team already lives in GitHub, you are closer to dropping Jira than you think. Here is how to make the switch.