Maturing DevOps for the first stage of an energy market reform

The challenge

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) operates Australia's largest gas and electricity markets and power systems, including the Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM) and power system in Western Australia. AEMO has been charged with implementing the WEM Reform Program, which includes significant changes to its IT systems.

To meet substantial availability and security needs, AEMO runs an advanced cloud and DevOps ecosystem on Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes and a service mesh. The teams working on the reform come from many disciplines and are spread across several locations and time zones, and all their work must comply with AEMO's security and cloud standards.

When Interfuze was engaged, the DevOps effort was still in its infancy. AEMO needed to mature that capability and take it through to production for the first of the reform's work packages.

Our approach

We sent in a principal consultant early, as technical lead, to address communications, organise the work, deal with issues and engage and manage stakeholders until AEMO's new technical lead came on board.

Two senior consultants took on the technical challenges and kept the DevOps effort moving across the relevant technical environments. Our principal consultant then handed over to AEMO's new lead and left the project, and the senior consultants stayed on to finish the DevOps initiative with the new DevOps lead.

As the environment matured, our consultants documented it and handed it over to AEMO's own team.

The outcome

Working together, the team released DevOps across all the technical environments and into production, and the first work package of the WEM Reform Program was rolled out to production.

The documentation and handover left AEMO with an internal DevOps capability ramped up to run it.