Case Study: Danske Bank achieves automated server and VM provisioning—reducing deployments from days to minutes with Chef

Automating Manual Server and VM Deployments, Creating an Internal Chef Community Through Ease-of-Use

Danske Bank, a major Nordic financial institution operating in 16 countries with 245 branches and over 20,000 employees, faced slow, manual, and error-prone provisioning of Linux servers and virtual machines in its on-premises private cloud. Without a programmatic way to apply or validate configurations, setup and verification were time-consuming and hard to scale.

By deploying Chef and developing cookbooks—paired with Chef InSpec to test configurations—Danske fully automated server and VM provisioning and updates. The change cut deployments from days to minutes, enabled policy-driven configuration changes instead of system-by-system edits, reduced repetitive work and configuration drift, and fostered an internal Chef community.

Danske Bank

Liudas Baksys

Development Team Manager