Case Study: IBM achieves continuous availability for high-traffic event sites with Chef

IBM - Customer Case Study

IBM’s Continuous Availability Services — Events Infrastructure (CAS‑EI) runs the web sites for high‑profile sporting events such as the US Open and Wimbledon, where hard deadlines and massive, visible traffic demand that sites never go down. The team faced a complex, hybrid environment (public SoftLayer and private OpenStack clouds across multiple production locations) with heterogeneous OSes and manual processes that caused configuration drift and made repeatable, reliable deployments difficult.

To solve this they standardized on RHEL and built an automation stack: IBM Cloud Orchestrator for provisioning, Chef for convergent configuration management, and UrbanCode Deploy for releases, with everything treated as code in GitLab and delivered via Jenkins, Packer and RPM packages. Combined with versioned roles, CI/CD, testing and strict code reviews, the approach eliminated manual drift, enabled repeatable self‑service deployments for customers, and reliably supported massive traffic (about half a billion page views during Wimbledon).

IBM

Brian O’Connell

Senior Technical Staff Member