2024 – A year in retrospect

What a year this was! ?? I thought of starting a tradition by reflecting on the year gone by.

K8s Community Building at Capgemini UK

This was my 3rd year at Capgemini UK, first year as the Cloud Native and Kubernetes capability lead. We have built an amazing community at the company, held monthly community calls where several vendors and colleagues shared their solutions, providing opportunities for others to learn about all things K8s. Solutions were showcased from #RedHat, #SuSE, #Isovalent, #ArgoCD, #Tekton, #FluxCD and many others helping to grow our knowledgebase, ensuring our teams are capable to support our client’s requirements to best of their abilities. In my opinion, the trend seems to be clear, more and more clients are interested in modernization of old workloads, or are looking into solutions enabling them securing their software supply chain, having an agile way of working to get ready to market faster and securely.

There are multiple accelerators ready or in the works to be available for our clients to achieve their goals with confidence. We will have more and more engineers certified in #CNCF and other vendor conducted exams ensuring our colleagues are recognized by the industry. Our capability is shaping up amazingly.

Project achievements with OBP

In addition to the internal capability with my primary client we also had a successful year, after going live with the Open Balancing Platform (OBP) just at the end of 2023 in mid-December. OBP is reimplementing how Great Britain manages its electricity grid while aiming for net-zero carbon targets defined by the Government. The platform has reduced the time and manual effort required in the control room, with the aim of delivering ￡15 million in annual savings to consumers. It estimated to have already saved multiple tens of thousands of metric tons of CO2 since its launch back in December 2023.

Our project is a multi-supplier project where during the last 3 years I have built a successful Platform Engineering team. Maintained a "badges-at-the-door" culture, where multiple IT suppliers (#Capgemini, #IBM, #TCS, #WIPRO, individual contractors) together provide members to cross-functional teams. The project team is located in diverse geographic locations (onshore, nearshore, and offshore) and works online, collaboratively.

The Platform Engineering/DevOps team has integrated 100+ developers and testers into a newly architected development process with shared pipelines, ensuring security, integrity of the platform.

As a recognition of our efforts computing.co.uk has awarded my team with the DevOps Team of the Year award in early 2024. Demonstrating that true collaboration between big suppliers is possible if we work towards a common goal, supporting Great Britain to have a future proof, sustainable electricity grid management system.

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The team has continued its amazing work during the entire year and ensured seamless rollouts of new platform versions on a fortnightly basis, including new versions, features of infrastructure and business application.

Much to our surprise at the Energy Storage Awards at the end of the year, the entire programme was awarded with the Product of the Year award. Getting recognized by the European Energy Storage industry is an amazing feat.

This clearly shows that all the efforts, struggles, sleepless nights from the last three years were worth it and we are on the right track. Though there is a lot to do a head to make our platform the de-facto system.

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Personal Milestones

While both the Capgemini internal capability and my main project has achieved a lot during the year, I’ve also managed to become a #RHCA in November. A long-lasting goal of mine which has demanded a lot from me and my family. Just this year I have passed 5 exams, spent countless additional hours preparing, practicing for these exams. I am grateful for all the support I got from my family, friends and colleagues.

In the same month I was surprised to be awarded with the People’s lead of the month award at Capgemini UK. I’m grateful to my team who have nominated me, I am truly humbled by the fact that they see me as such a person and really hope next year I can support them even better.

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As I mentioned earlier, this year has been amazing, but certainly could not achieve everything I wanted. There are a lot of plans in my head which I look ahead to focusing on more effectively in 2025, while maintaining the same level of commitment to people and technology. I am privileged that I have a family which understands and accepts me as I am and many colleagues, teams in multiple locations I can gain more from than I give. Thank you everyone!

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2024 has been an incredible year of growth and learning for me. How has it been for you? What trends or goals are you seeing in your industry for 2025? Wishing everyone a fantastic year ahead filled with challenges and successes!