Bank Hapoalim

Why automate?

The decision to automate with Chef was driven by concerns that will sound familiar to many who are responsible for an organization’s infrastructure. Oz Sharon, the team’s manager explains, “We wanted to focus on doing standard, repeatable work. We saw that we were doing the same tasks again and again but each time the result was a bit different because the person who was doing the job now was not the person who did the job before. Consequently, we had a lot of services that were all slightly different from each other. We wanted to reach a point where we could do the same thing repeatedly, without any changes between deployments. We needed to know that our servers were always in compliance with the bank’s standards. The other thing we wanted to do was get rid of the boring things that take a lot of time like creating a special server with software on top of it or hardening servers.”

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.

Not only have they significantly reduced the number of human errors but they can manage their infrastructure consistently across several DMZs. Chef has given them better control across the organization, even in areas that aren’t obvious. For example, the bank has operators who handle calls and problems from internal customers at night and, with Chef, the team has been able to standardize their menus.