With more companies embarking on digital transformation, demand for DevOps services is sustainably growing. DevOps practices help to match business values with the development process, encourage development cycles, address security issues and create more robust and resilient systems.This leads to better business results, improved operational performance and finally, more satisfied customers.

 

DevOps comprises a large suite of practices, many of which could bring value even if implemented isolatedly. However, to work to its fullest, DevOps requires a holistic and consistent approach with adopting the practices on both organizational and team level.

 

Can you outsource DevOps? Definitely yes, providing that you are ready to adopt it internally. Moreover, the advantages of outsourcing DevOps could make it even more beneficial than hiring an on-site team, and here is why.

 

 

Benefits of outsourcing DevOps

 

  • Access to best candidates. Good specialists are expensive and could be hard to find locally. Outsourcing frees you from geographical limits providing access to a pool of skilled candidates worldwide. It also offers a good price-quality ratio as you can choose among available candidates those with the most suitable rate.

 

  • Immediate start of work. Educating specialists in-house could be a difficult and longtime process, while your tasks won’t wait. With outsourcing you get a fully-fledged specialist equipped with all required skills and knowledge to start tasks resolving right away.

 

  • Payment by result. The great advantage of outsource is that you pay only for the tasks that have been specified within an agreement and completed in due terms. No staff costs or workplace expenses are needed, as with on-site workers.

 

  • Extensive expertise. The team of DevOps outsourcing provider usually comprises skilled experts experienced in different projects. With teammates sharing their knowledge and skills, the company’s expertise grows to become comprehensive. If an engineer assigned for a task falls short of skills, he or she can be swapped for a more qualified colleague.

 

 

How does DevOps outsourcing work?

 

A customer defines a set of problems that he or she wants to address with the help of an outsourcing provider, and chooses a contractor. The outsourcing company starts with conducting a technical audit to analyze the current state of the customer’s infrastructure. Based on the results, the outsourcer suggests ways to solve the problems and optimize the existing system. Together with the customer they define the scope of works and terms of its implementation, and sign the agreement. The outsourcer assigns an engineer/engineers to support the project and perform the tasks defined in the agreement. Communication with the customer is conducted via a chosen communication channel (email, Slack, phone, etc).

 

 

Choosing DevOps outsourcing company

 

Having decided to outsource DevOps services, pay attention to the following points when looking for a provider:

 

  • Time to address a customer’s service request. For every system performance and availability are critical, and especially for external-facing applications. Every minute of a downtime could be disastrous and lossmaking. That is why it is crucial to respond to high priority alerts ASAP to minimize downtime and mitigate negative effects.

 

  • Customized solution. There is no such thing as two identical projects. Each project is unique and requires a thoughtful approach driven by business objectives. The decision in favor of particular technology should be based on the problems that this technology helps to address, and never on its ubiquity. For example, Kubernetes has a remarkable set of features that can really boost your development cycle. However, to leverage it to the fullest your software should be cloud-native and designed for microservice architecture. Moreover, you need a well-trained team to maintain your infrastructure, otherwise the technology may backfire in bringing excessive complexity to your project.

 

  • Task management system. Using task management systems is a common practice for most companies. They help organize work and make teams collaborate effectively. Still, the functionality of these tools differs. While most of them allow for bug/issue tracking, not all of them can integrate with external solutions or customers’ systems. Make sure that the system of your service provider allows customers tracking issue status, make comments and see labor hours expended on issue solving.

 

  • Customer testimonials. A reliable DevOps outsourcing company should have a proven track record of successfully delivered projects. The numbers speak for themselves, while the complexity and diversity of these projects prove the company’s expertise.

 

 

Why outsourcing to SHALB

 

SHALB provides a wide range of DevOps outsourcing services, including infrastructure consultancy, cloud migration, set up of CI/CD pipelines, containers’ management and orchestration, and much more. Available for outsourcing are the roles of SRE, DevOps engineer and Cloud architect.

 

Our response to monitoring notifications takes no longer than 5 minutes and resolving of non-critical issues starts within an hour. We use Jira issue management tool that can be coordinated with Opsgenie, a solution for alerting and incident management, to escalate open issues with high priority. We assume financial responsibility for a downtime caused through the fault of our staff, and refund money in case a customer is dissatisfied with our services.

 

For over 10 years that SHALB has been providing DevOps services, we have created more than 100 different infrastructures that proved to be highly efficient and resilient. Consult our experts for the guidelines on how to improve your technology delivery! Entrust our qualified engineers to organize and fine-tune the DevOps processes inside your company to achieve better business results and maximum efficiency of your systems.