Tech-010: Moving from On-Premise to Cloud: My First Big DevOps Transformation
When I first started at DMS Navigator, everything lived on-premise in a local data centre.
I was data centre trained, had the keys, and would often spend time patching and maintaining physical servers. But as the industry shifted, I knew we needed to explore the cloud — and that decision set me on the next stage of my DevOps journey.
We slowly started to provision services in azure cloud like virtual machines and networking
I also noticed there were some gaps in my previous CICD solution ...
We faced significant challenges around reporting and observability, particularly when trying to link releases back to work items in our PlanIO system. On top of that, we constantly battled the dreaded “file is checked out” issues that came with using SVN’s centralized version control.
Unhappy with the current state and looking for other solutions I came across azure devops, right when it transitioned from TFS…
So, coming up to the Xmas break I spent a lot of my evenings at home starting to architect a new CICD solution using azure devops and my first distributed version control system (GIT)
As with the previous solution I designed all this up end to end, created a power point presentation complete with pros and cons and presented it my team and the managing director.
This solution would replace our well-established TeamCity build server with Azure Pipelines, migrate our SVN repositories to Azure Repos, and transition our PlanIO work item tracker to Azure Boards.
Hello “consolidation”
After getting buy in from everyone my idea got the green light. I then thought the best time to do this change would be over the Xmas break when our customers were also on leave and traffic was low. We would then be able to start the new year with a fresh solution.
I successfully completed this and we started the new year with a brand-new consolidated platform, merging 3 platforms into 1. I still didn’t know it yet, but my career was shifting more and more towards Devops
Reflection
I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but this was another big step in my transition from developer to DevOps engineer. With every project, I was moving further from just writing code — and closer to enabling teams to build, ship, and innovate faster