Case Study: SAP achieves rapid self-service developer infrastructure provisioning with Chef

Enabling Developer Services at SAP

SAP, the market leader in enterprise application software, tasked its DevOps Center of Excellence (CoE) with scaling and modernizing infrastructure to meet rising application demand and speed up developer delivery. The CoE manages about 10,000 nodes across diverse OSes and previously relied on many ad hoc scripts and slow, manual provisioning processes that could take days—forcing a shift from a traditional shared-services model to a developer-centric services model.

The team standardized on Chef and built reusable cookbooks plus a Unified Cloud Portal (UCP) for self-service provisioning to internal and public clouds, bootstrapping nodes to run Chef automatically. This modular approach (à la carte or prebuilt landscapes), plus Chef’s test-and-repair policy enforcement and a GitHub PR workflow, reduced provisioning to a few clicks and 20 minutes–3 hours, improved compliance and collaboration, and enabled a culture shift toward DevOps and faster time-to-market.

SAP

Ran Kahal

Director of DevOps Center of Excellence