ARCHITECTS ARE SHAPING THE FUTURE OF DEVOPS

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From Legacy to Cloud: The Start of Change

Toon recalls how, just five years ago, Essent’s IT systems weren’t ready for the future of the energy transition.

“What we saw in the company was from an IT perspective, what we were doing was just not good enough for the future that is awaiting us,” Toon explained. “The energy transition is a systemic change. It’s unpredictable, so we needed to adapt much faster than before.”

The move to DevOps teams and cloud automation was a cornerstone of that transformation. By automating operations, teams could focus more on development and innovation.

Shifting the Role of Architects

Traditionally, architects dictated what needed to be done. Toon notes that this prescriptive approach no longer fits.

“Ten years ago, the architect prescribed what you need to do. We don’t want that anymore,” he said. “Now, it’s about co-creating with teams. They bring deep technical knowledge, and architects bring the bigger picture.”

To support this, Essent created initiatives like the Tech Crew and a Tech Radar, which allow engineers to propose and share technology choices from the bottom up.

Team Autonomy and Ownership

A major cultural change came with the idea of “You build it, you run it, you own it.” This principle gives DevOps teams end-to-end responsibility.
One example was cloud accounts. Originally, teams had to wait nine weeks to get an account, blocking agility.
“That clearly doesn’t help team autonomy,” Toon said. “So we changed it. Now, every team gets its own account within a week, fully automated. That’s how you do a change, you sit on it until it’s done.”

This shift not only increased speed but also reinforced accountability. If a team is paged at 3 a.m., they feel true ownership of their services.

Balancing Innovation and Standards

With more than 40 DevOps teams, giving everyone freedom to experiment risks fragmentation.

“If you give 40 teams the possibility to do whatever they want, you get 40 different solutions,” Toon explained. “Innovation is great, but we don’t need 20 different monitoring solutions. It’s about balance.”

Architects now play a role in helping teams see costs, security trade-offs, and long-term implications, so they can make informed decisions.

The Importance of Explaining “Why”

For Toon, architecture is no longer about detailed designs, but about context and communication.
“Explaining the ‘why’ of an architecture is much more important than the architecture itself,” he said. “Developers need to understand the trade-offs so they can come up with the best ideas.”

Looking Back with Pride

Reflecting on the past four years, Toon is proud of the cultural and technological transformation.

“If you look back at what we’ve done, it’s amazing,” he said. “We changed the whole landscape from old-fashioned technology to something cloud-based. It was fierce, but everyone stayed in. No high sick leave, no burnouts — and that’s something to be proud of.”

One striking example of progress: during the Ukraine war, a sudden traffic spike caused outages for a week. A similar spike recently passed almost unnoticed.

“This time, nobody was paged. Business as usual. That shows how far we’ve come.”

What’s Next

The next step for architecture at Essent is making costs, security, and performance insights easily accessible to teams, so they can optimize themselves. Continuous integration now extends far beyond testing, including documentation, security scanning, and more.

As Toon put it:
“It’s not just CI/CD, it’s CI/CD plus continuous testing, continuous documentation, continuous everything. That’s the future of DevOps architecture.”

Closing Thoughts

The conversation highlights how architecture has shifted from control to enablement, from rigid prescriptions to shared responsibility. Essent’s journey shows that empowering teams, balancing freedom with standards, and fostering a culture of ownership are key to thriving in the fast-changing energy and tech landscape

👉 Next in the podcast series: Sami will discuss how event-driven architecture helps reduce technical debt and speed up innovation.