Case Study: Barclays achieves automated compliance and eliminates downtime across 110,000 servers with Chef

Streamlining the compliance and management of 110,000 servers and 4,000 applications

Barclays, a large transatlantic consumer and wholesale bank active in the UK and US, needed to manage a highly regulated, mission‑critical estate of roughly 110,000 servers and 4,000 applications across Windows and Linux. The scale and regulatory requirements created pressure for clear audit reporting, tight governance, and zero tolerance for downtime while continuing to deliver new services quickly.

Barclays deployed Chef Automate, Chef Infra and Chef InSpec with a self‑service front end and automated cookbook testing (the “Chef Cookbook Delivery Pipeline”), using Test Kitchen and CIS profiles for dev testing and compliance reporting. The result was a fully automated dev/prod pipeline that preserves compliance, delivers consistent, repeatable processes for 10,000+ dev/sec/ops engineers, accelerates remediation, and enables faster, lower‑risk rollout of new services.

Barclays

Jonathan Arch

Public Cloud Deployment Engineer