Banking on speed and security

After decades of growth, Atruvia’s tech stack reached a breaking point as the company’s infrastructure expanded across datacenters, OpenShift clusters, and public clouds — each with its own tools, processes, and compliance frameworks. Fragmented automation, manual provisioning, and inconsistent governance began slowing delivery and innovation. What once ensured stability and reach had become a tangled web of dependencies.

“We were running 250,000 workstations and thousands of virtual machines,” said Martin Pelke, Product Owner for Infrastructure as Code at Atruvia. “We were operating with a weird stack of tooling that you fuse together. And it was still always process-oriented rather than product-oriented.”

The strain reached a critical point when Atruvia needed to scale its OpenShift footprint from a handful of clusters to as many as forty. Ticket-based workflows and manual handoffs meant developers waited weeks for new resources, while institutional knowledge remained locked in silos. A fundamentally different approach was needed.

Atruvia’s modernization journey began with a trusted security foundation. For years, IBM® Vault® had served as the central secrets manager for on-premises applications — securing credentials, managing access keys, and enforcing compliance across critical banking systems. Building on that layer, Atruvia set out to bring the same consistency and control to infrastructure delivery.

IBM Terraform® provided the answer. What started as a proof-of-concept for deploying cloud infrastructure grew quickly into a company-wide initiative to standardize provisioning, enable developer self-service, and embed compliance into every workflow.

Atruvia deployed Terraform as the backbone of their new new platform-as-a-product model. By defining infrastructure as code (IaC), teams replaced manual requests with standardized, reusable modules and GitOps workflows. To secure provisioning in a regulated financial environment, Terraform was integrated with Vault and GitLab pipelines — enabling secrets to be injected directly into CI/CD workflows with full audit trails and automated policy enforcement.

Cultural transformation was equally important. Atruvia led by example rather than mandate. “We showed and didn’t tell,” said Lukas Essig, Senior Cloud Platform Engineer. “We created a GitOps onboarding pattern, and more teams adopted it because it worked.” Dedicated consultants guided development teams through the process, from repository setup to deploying infrastructure the Atruvia way.

 The shift to IBM Terraform and Vault transformed both the speed and the culture of infrastructure delivery at Atruvia. What once took months can now be done in minutes, freeing teams to move faster with greater confidence.

A defining moment came when the network team needed to replicate a complex cloud-native network configuration for a second data center segment. Previously, the setup had evolved through years of experimentation, making it notoriously difficult and time-consuming to reproduce. With Terraform, they built the entire configuration in 15 minutes — a task that would previously have taken weeks.

Compliance, once a manual audit process, is now embedded in every workflow through automated scanning and centralized secret management. Security teams can trace every infrastructure change, while developers benefit from faster feedback loops and fewer bottlenecks.

From infrastructure deployment and secrets management to network automation and a culture of engineering ownership, Atruvia has fundamentally transformed how it builds, secures, and scales the technology that powers modern banking in Germany.

Atruvia is the IT service provider for Germany’s cooperative and private banks, delivering core banking platforms, IT infrastructure and secure digital services to more than 900 institutions nationwide. With nearly 5,500 employees, the company operates at the core of Germany’s financial system, processing over 9.3 billion transactions annually, supporting 91 million customer accounts and powering 26,000 self-service machines across the country.