Our professionals speak

Meet Phani Bhushan

Phani is a DevOps transformation consultant with over 15 years of experience. For the last 7 years, he has been coaching teams and organizations to achieve all the advantages of an Agile process. He has worked with a broad range of organizations from small ones that are focusing on one product to big hierarchical companies that deliver a range of products and services.

Phani has coached both collocated teams in India and distributed Scrum teams located in Europe and India. His key expertise is helping organizations with their DevOps journey which includes: CI, CD and Cloud strategies, bus also imbibing the right engineering culture. He currently lives in the Netherlands and is helping major Dutch companies with their journey towards DevOps.

My current assignment

I am working with a large Dutch insurance organization to help them with their DevOps transformation. In this transformation, we are improving three major aspects: reliability, speed and quality. In order to reach these goals, we have to focus on multiple areas and levels within the organization.

Right now, I am helping several teams with their new “way of working” (which includes engineering practices and adopting new tools/techniques) to achieve the transformation goals. I help these teams change with an incremental coaching/consulting approach because change can be hard. Just introducing a tool or new process will have limited impact unless there is a change in the teams’ mindset. Therefore, we do not only focus on the “what” and “how” but also “why”. For example the introduction of a new practice such as “unit testing” requires educating a team: How to start with the practice. Which tool/framework to use. Finally, they must understand why this practice is important to the team and what benefits they will get from it.

I’m currently focusing on increasing the reliability of services of the teams I’m coaching. One of the current focus points is the automatic validation of their infrastructure code. These teams are using tools like Packer, Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation etc. to automate their infrastructure. However, what we lack is a holistic approach to validate the end state of the infrastructure. We plan to explore tools like Inspec to fill this gap.

Cloud is awesome

Why I think that cloud is the future

We are in the age of digital disruption. To be competitive in today’s market, organizations need to become more and more responsive. I strongly believe that cloud is a technology which enables organizations to acquire certain basic core capabilities. It are these capabilities that will help them to enable digital disruption.

Cloud as a technology not only helps with the infrastructure needs and with better collaboration, but it also lays the path for a true DevOps organization. Having the right cloud strategy is key to leverage the true potential of this technology. I believe fast emerging areas (such as AI, Machine learning and IoT) will become a necessity. Focusing on these technologies is no longer an option but mandatory for organizations who want to have disruptive digital avenues to reach their customers.

And this is why I think cloud is the future.