Case Study: Standard Bank achieves continuous deployment and accelerated release velocity with Chef

Standard Bank - Customer Case Study

Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank, faced slow software delivery driven by a 40+ year technology legacy and a highly heterogeneous environment (mainframes, Red Hat/SUSE/Solaris/AIX, Cobol, Java). Inconsistent provisioning, long VM lead times, manual handoffs between teams and siloed Dev and Ops processes made releases slow and error-prone, threatening the bank’s ability to deliver features at the required velocity.

The bank launched a DevOps transformation with Chef, creating a cross-functional “Chop Chop” team to build an automated, test-driven pipeline (Chef cookbooks, Test Kitchen/Serverspec, Bamboo CI) and break down silos. The results included standardized, repeatable environments (entire Internet banking environment spun up in 17 minutes; production stack builds in ~26 minutes), faster deployments and testing, a 12-week pilot time-to-market, hundreds of automated tests and a cultural shift to engineering-led, blameless collaboration.

Standard Bank

Dawie Olivier

Executive Head of Group Technology Build