As developers, we often find ourselves in a predictable rhythm: analyze requirements, estimate story points, code, and move on to the next sprint. This was my routine, and while I enjoyed crafting new features, something about it felt incomplete. Listening to DevOps teammates discuss cloud architecture, scalability, and security was both fascinating and vital for ensuring our systems could scale and thrive in production.
About a year ago, I had the opportunity to step into the DevOps world, I joined the Platform Engineering team at Signetic, which combined elements of DevOps with broader responsibilities. What follows is my experience transitioning into this space—what I learned, the challenges I faced, and how developers and DevOps teams can work together to build something greater.
Why DevOps?
For developers, curiosity often sparks interest in DevOps—how code functions in production environments. For me, this curiosity evolved into a drive to ensure the scalability of my code.
Our application, built on Power Apps and an event-driven microservices architecture, enabled rapid development but brought challenges like rising costs and performance bottlenecks. As we scaled to onboard more users and meet SOC2 and HIPAA compliance, the lack of cohesive processes became a significant obstacle. Silos between development and operations led to delays and inefficiencies, underscoring the need for change.
To address these challenges,Signetic formed the Platform Engineering team with a mission to build a resilient system capable of supporting growth while ensuring compliance. This team stood out by combining the expertise of both cloud and code to tackle modern software delivery complexities collaboratively.
The learning curve: Transitioning from developer to DevOps
Joining the Platform Engineering team was both exciting and daunting. The technical learning curve was steep. I started with small tasks like automating CI/CD pipelines and deploying basic cloud services. Gradually, I explored Kubernetes, containerization, and infrastructure-as-code principles.
My journey wasn’t just about learning new tools—the bigger challenge was shifting my approach to problem-solving. Instead of reacting to issues, I learned to anticipate them. Questions like “How will this scale?”, “Is there a simpler way?”, and “What happens if this fails?” became central to my thinking.
Collaboration was equally vital. Success in platform engineering relied on working with developers to embed best practices, compliance teams to meet audit requirements, and leadership to advocate for automation and observability requiring a cross-functional approach. Ultimately, platform engineering demanded systemic thinking and a commitment to designing for scalability and reliability.
Challenges and way forward
Before embarking on this new journey, one thing was clear: it wasn’t going to be easy. As the project grew in complexity, the technical debt and operational overhead increased. The growing pile of manual operational tasks began to stifle innovation within the DevOps team. This, in turn, created silos between the Development and Operations teams, weakening collaboration and slowing down delivery timelines.
One of the major challenges was earning the confidence of stakeholders, especially when foundational concepts like security and scalability often took a back seat. In their defense, it’s difficult to scale a feature that doesn’t yet exist—after all, "Make it better" can only come after "Make it work."
We quickly realized that keeping technical debt under control required the platform team to pay the 'monthly tech premium.' This meant dedicating time to building tools that automated manual operational tasks, maintaining code quality, documenting processes as we built, and automating tests to meet quality assurance goals. Additionally, we faced the ongoing challenge of optimizing infrastructure costs to ensure sustainability.
DevOps for an impact
We began this journey by building tools to automate processes. Our team’s North Star shifted from merely burning through story points to significantly reducing manual operational hours. This transformation allowed us to reduce the time required to onboard a new pharmacy from several days to a single day—with further goals to bring it down to mere minutes. Moreover, we ensured that all applications and microservices adhered to continuous integration and deployment standards, enabling us to build and ship faster.
By conducting performance tests on various applications and identifying bottlenecks, we improved the performance of critical systems, including the billing system. The reduced onboarding time and increased team productivity allowed us to showcase value through quantifiable metrics, ultimately securing stakeholder support.
We also invested in tools such as SonarQube and Snyk to monitor code quality and vulnerabilities. Complementing these investments were knowledge-sharing sessions on code reviews, automated testing, and documentation practices, all of which helped us maintain coding standards and keep technical debt in check.
Sometimes, simplicity proved to be the best strategy. This insight was crucial when integrating our event messaging system with Power Apps. A straightforward approach helped us resolve performance bottlenecks while improving both the security and debuggability of the system.
To optimize costs, we conducted continuous audits of our cloud resources, consulted Microsoft experts, maintained monthly cloud spending reports, carefully selected licenses, and resources, and analyzed areas for cost reductions. These efforts revealed opportunities to reduce cloud expenses.
Amid these initiatives, we collaborated with compliance auditors to implement processes that made SOC2 and HIPAA compliance more manageable and less burdensome.
When developers get additional responsibilities—such as deployments, research, POCs, and integrations—it occasionally slows feature development. The platform team stepped in to provide seamless pathways for developers to build and test their features efficiently.
Our platform team, a diverse group of specialists, often felt like a gang of misfits working together on a heist. Despite our differences, we were able to make significant strides. And as we move forward, we’re excited to tackle new challenges, including centralized logging and monitoring, and unified single sign-on systems.
Bridging the gap: Key learnings
Working as both a Developer and in DevOps has given me valuable insights into the processes, mindsets, and philosophies of both teams. While there are notable similarities, there are also key differences in how these teams approach their work. Here are some of the lessons that developers and operations teams can learn from each other. ##$ What developers can learn from DevOps/Operational teams
- Holistic thinking: Adopting a system-wide perspective, taking ownership of the entire software lifecycle.
- Proactive problem-solving: Learning to anticipate issues to build resilient, scalable solutions.
- Collaboration: Breaking silos and fostering open communication enables developers to align with cross-functional teams and shared goals.
- Iterative improvement: Practicing continuous improvement—measuring, learning, and adapting— to enhance developers' workflows.
What operational teams can learn from developers
- Shift-left thinking: Addressing potential issues earlier in the lifecycle, such as during design or pipeline automation, to prevent downstream inefficiencies.
- Fail fast, learn fast: Adopting a developer mindset of testing and iterating in controlled environments can refine strategies effectively.
- Simplicity in design: Emphasizing simplicity helps reduce complexity in processes, tooling, and infrastructure.
- Code-driven operations: Infrastructure as code simplifies automation and enforces guardrails for cost efficiency.
The bigger picture: Empowering teams and systems
Transitioning into DevOps has been one of the most rewarding and transformative phases of my career. While I occasionally miss the immediacy of feature development, the far-reaching impact of platform engineering makes this journey incredibly fulfilling. By focusing on the bigger picture, we’re building systems that empower teams to innovate confidently and efficiently.
A core DevOps principle—"you build it, you test it"—emphasizes a strong collaboration and overlap between development and operations teams. Through platform engineering, we’ve made significant strides toward realizing that vision. Looking ahead, our goal is to bring more developers into the fold, equipping them with the DevOps philosophy and fostering a mindset that blends the best of both development and operations perspectives.