Moving from Reactive Ops to Platform Engineering

Most infrastructure teams start in the same place: something breaks, someone fixes it, repeat. Everything is manual, environments are inconsistent, and the improvement work keeps getting pushed back because there is always another incident to deal with.

Getting out of that cycle takes more than just buying new tools. It is a change in how the team works day to day.

What reactive ops looks like

In a reactive setup, the team spends most of its time on:

Fixing things after users have already noticed
Building infrastructure by hand through the portal or console
Figuring out why staging and production are different again
Doing the same repetitive tasks over and over

It is exhausting, and the backlog of things you actually want to build never gets shorter.

What actually needs to change

Get visibility first

You cannot fix what you cannot see. Before anything else, get proper monitoring in place. Whether it is Zabbix, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, or something else, you need:

Baseline metrics on every production host: CPU, memory, disk, network
Application-level checks: response codes, latency, queue depths
Alerts that fire before users notice, not after
A dashboard the whole team can look at to see how things are doing

Put your infrastructure in code

Every resource built by hand is one that will drift. Once you move to IaC (Bicep, Terraform, Ansible), you get:

Consistent, reproducible environments
Changes reviewed through pull requests
A clear record of who changed what and when
Provisioning that takes minutes instead of days

Automate the obvious stuff

Once you have monitoring and IaC sorted, start automating responses to known problems. If a disk fills up at 3am and you know exactly what to clean up, that should not wake someone up. Script it and let the monitoring trigger it.

Run proper post-incident reviews

When things do go wrong, focus on what to improve rather than who to blame. What could we have monitored? What could we have automated? Does the runbook need updating?

How to tell if it is working

A few things to keep an eye on:

Are you catching problems before users report them?
Is time-to-fix getting shorter?
Is the team spending more time building than firefighting?
Are deployments failing less often?

It takes time

This does not happen in a sprint. It is a gradual process of getting better tooling in place, building trust in automation, and showing the wider business that infrastructure is not just a cost to be minimised.