Synchrony Bank: Accelerating Infrastructure Delivery with Secure, Standardized IaC Templates

About Synchrony Bank

Synchrony Bank is one of the nation’s leading consumer financial services companies, offering a wide range of credit products, loyalty programs, and banking solutions to millions of customers. As a digital-first financial institution, Synchrony’s technology organization plays a critical role in maintaining security, compliance, and reliability across a large portfolio of internal applications and services.

To continue scaling safely and efficiently, Synchrony needed a way to standardize infrastructure provisioning across teams—particularly for complex, high-governance resources like databases and EKS clusters. Their goal was to ensure that every new environment deployed in the cloud met security and compliance standards from day one, without slowing down development velocity.

The Challenge

As Synchrony’s developer and infrastructure teams expanded, the process for provisioning infrastructure became increasingly complex and inconsistent. Teams were manually managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates and configurations for cloud resources—resulting in:

• Inconsistent configurations across teams and environments
  
• Manual review cycles that slowed down delivery and created bottlenecks
  
• Security and compliance risk due to ad hoc configurations
  
• Developer friction when setting up or modifying databases and Kubernetes clusters
  
  

Synchrony needed a solution that balanced speed and standardization—allowing developers to self-service infrastructure requests while ensuring that every deployment remained compliant and pre-approved.

The Solution

Tensure partnered with Synchrony to design and implement a platform-aligned IaC framework that enables secure, self-service infrastructure provisioning using standardized templates and patterns.

The engagement centered around two primary areas:

1. Pre-Approved Infrastructure Templates for Databases
   Tensure developed reusable Terraform modules that encapsulate security best practices, operational parameters, and organizational standards for database provisioning. By adopting a T-shirt sizing model—small, medium, large—teams could select pre-approved configurations that automatically applied the correct settings for backup retention, performance, encryption, and network access.
   Developers now specify only minimal parameters, such as environment and instance size, while the system automatically applies validated configurations. This dramatically simplifies database provisioning while ensuring full compliance.
   
   
2. Standardized EKS Cluster Deployments
   In parallel, Tensure helped Synchrony create templated patterns for deploying Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters. These templates enforce consistent networking, security group policies, and cluster configurations—reducing risk and accelerating new team onboarding.
   With pre-approved IaC modules, development teams can now request and deploy EKS clusters confidently, knowing that every environment adheres to Synchrony’s cloud and security standards.
   
   

The Results

By applying platform engineering principles—automation, golden paths, and self-service infrastructure—Synchrony dramatically improved its internal cloud operations.

Key outcomes include:

• Streamlined infrastructure delivery: Teams can now deploy pre-approved databases and EKS clusters in minutes instead of days.
  
• Reduced configuration drift and human error: Every deployment automatically aligns with organizational policies and security controls.
  
• Improved developer experience: Developers can focus on building features instead of managing infrastructure complexity.
  
• Accelerated onboarding: New teams can launch environments confidently using standardized IaC templates.
  
• Embedded compliance by design: Each deployment automatically meets Synchrony’s governance and audit requirements.
  
  

This work has effectively transformed Synchrony’s infrastructure model from a manual, request-driven process into a self-service, compliant, and scalable platform—empowering developers to deliver faster without compromising safety.

Platform Engineering in Practice

Synchrony’s IaC modernization represents a major step toward a mature internal developer platform (IDP)—one where infrastructure provisioning is automated, secure, and developer-friendly. By building reusable IaC templates and golden paths, Tensure helped Synchrony move from click-based provisioning to policy-driven automation.

The result is a foundation that not only improves developer velocity but also provides operational consistency, cost efficiency, and confidence in compliance—the hallmarks of a well-designed platform engineering strategy.

The Impact

Synchrony Bank’s platform transformation demonstrates how infrastructure automation can serve both developers and governance teams. With standardized IaC modules in place, the organization now operates with greater agility and reduced risk.

What was once a manual, approval-heavy process has become a seamless, self-service experience—laying the groundwork for broader adoption of platform engineering practices across the enterprise.

At a Glance