HCS Open Platform Experience

Belastingdienst: The Road to DevOps and OpenShift
2025-11-19 , Blue room (main stage)

A five-year journey from siloed teams and shared responsibilities to a DevOps-driven culture empowered by OpenShift. This talk shares the challenges and lessons from a team that took initiative in adopting DevOps practices and applying OpenShift in ways that best fit their needs at the time. Our focus was on discovering how to effectively work with OpenShift as consumers, exploring cloud-native development practices and shaping our own delivery workflows. Throughout this journey, we collaborated closely with the Cloud Platform Enabling Team to align with platform capabilities and ensure smooth integration.


In this presentation, I will share the story of how our team navigated the transition to DevOps and cloud-native development, and how we found our place on the OpenShift platform. Starting from a context of siloed responsibilities and limited DevOps maturity, we took initiative to redefine how we work—experimenting, learning, and building our own solutions along the way.
Rather than following a predefined path, we carved out our own approach to DevOps, tailored to our needs and challenges. We explored automation, CI/CD, containerization, and platform integration, all while collaborating closely with the Cloud Platform Enabling Team (CPET) to align with the broader OpenShift ecosystem.
A key part of our journey was integrating legacy systems with modern cloud-native technologies. We made deliberate choices about what to modernize and when, balancing innovation with the need for stability and security. Especially around database technologies, where expertise and capacity played a crucial role in our step-by-step approach.
This talk is a reflection on our journey: the obstacles we faced, the decisions we made, and the lessons we learned as a team striving to modernize our way of working.

Nick Jansen (42) is Lead DevOps Engineer with a background in middleware and integration. He has almost 20 years of experience across various organizations and has been working in DevOps for the past 5 years. Nick lives in Deventer with his wife and three children.