Chef at Bank Hapoalim

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Bank Hapoalim is Israel’s largest bank and was named by The Banker magazine as Bank of the Year in Israel for 2015.

The bank’s Unix and Linux team has been using Chef for only about five months and they have made enormous progress automating their infrastructure in a highly secure environment. The team uses Chef for configuration management and, less conventionally, they are also using their Chef server as a package and proxy package repository. The Chef server deploys and installs the application packages on production servers.

The bank has heterogeneous infrastructure that includes various flavors of Linux and Unix as well as Windows. Currently, the team is using Chef to manage hundreds of Linux nodes, with plans to start managing hundreds more Windows nodes and, of course, new Linux/Unix servers as they are added.

In the short time that they have been using Chef, the team has already seen significant improvements in deployment time. For example, creating a stack that includes bootstrapping a Linux server, hardening it, and installing the application server along with other software used to take days. It now takes minutes.

You can read more about how Bank Hapoalim is using Chef in the Skills Library article, “Chef at Bank Hapoalim.”

Roberta Leibovitz

Former Chef Employee