There’s a demand for the software development to further reduce project execution time from the crafting of an idea to the release of a product. Businesses are pushed to implement the project today so that someone else does not copy it tomorrow. Moreover, the budget to do the impossible is often limited.
The developers have no choice but to engage in process optimization, experiment, and try new methodologies again and again. In specific cases, temporary reserves are searched in literally every department, and not only make developers type faster.
It turns out that testers, managers, analysts, and the implementation department can work faster. All that remains is to figure out how to achieve this. The methodologies of flexible and rapid, and sometimes extreme, development come to the rescue; this can let you solve this problem. The method that can unite a few departments will surely breakthrough.
DevOps has become a bridge between Development and Operations that provides development teams with the fast deployment of the software.
Engineers are engaged in every phase of the program development lifecycle from designing to supporting clients. Agile methodology and DevOps practices give you a rapid speed of development with testing and updating your product before its final release.
How can your business benefit from it? You don’t need to wait a month before publishing the app, and you don’t need to wait until all the bugs are detected and fixed. You have functional automation of the DevOps pipeline where you are sure that your service meets all the quality standards.
Why DevOps is Necessary
DevOps lifecycle revolves around agility and automation.
DevOps is implemented as a competitive advantage by a number of companies that have to operate at higher speeds and with greater agility.
Using DevOps methodology becomes possible to break down the barrier between development and operations teams. Due to the best practices and set of tools, it lets automate processes, implement changes effectively and on time, accelerate the delivery process and make it more reliable.
According to the State of DevOps Report, there is a list of things that may expect a company that has determined to implement DevOps:
- Quicker delivery velocity;
- Higher flexibility for development dealing with various applications, components or services;
- Fewer security issues;
- Lower change failure rate; and
- Better reporting of metrics that can be shared within the business due to automated systems.
As a result: Implementing DevOps allows you to provide a better product that suits your business better.
Whilst some companies hire in-house specialists and benefit from it, others don't think it to be a great option in terms of time and money. Are the companies using DevOps only in-house?
The remote DevOps team is an excellent alternative to the in-house team. To outsource DevOps services is a great option.
Can DevOps Be Outsourced?
DevOps is a set of practices and philosophy for a fast and efficient process of delivering a product to the market. This approach allows building new products, testing and deploying them in a shorter time compared to a traditional software development lifecycle (SDLC).
DevOps is a combination of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines into every phase of the product delivery process. The goal is to make sure that the project is operational and the updates are constant, cumulative, and traceable. You can hire an in-house team or outsource the tasks to a remote team. Let’s have a look at the reasons for choosing the second option.
What is the Workflow of an Average DevOps Team?
When we talk about DevOps teams, we mean the efficiency of the workflow. What do we need to do to reach this state of operations? Let’s have a look at the typical workflow of such a team.
Know more: How to Hire a DevOps Engineer in 2021
Development and operations departments get rid of the isolated approaches to completing tasks. There are no more cases like “it works on my server” or the problem of throwing the code over the wall. If you see Devs and Ops work together and the project has the same KPIs for the workers, communication and cooperation will improve.
You can see knowledge exchange between the team members.
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An Ops engineer can detect and fix some bugs and send the code to production (and avoid sending a notification to Devs and QA informing about the problem).
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A Dev engineer will see how the code works in production, and this lets to plan the architecture for a monolith or microservice application.
You can have some time pass by and see regular fixes: these cases can be automated with the script or the infrastructure/code/workflows are enhanced to get rid of these bottlenecks; this is an excellent pathway for the Devs that can send the code to different environments without the need to add new tasks for the Ops engineers. Moreover, from the Ops side, we can have a deployment manifest that contains required artifacts to let the Devs make an environment with a single command.
Focusing on the result is not enough - some processes for service continuity should be present. Team players combine their efforts to implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI & CD) pipelines to guarantee constant project feasibility and cumulative improvement.
When all the drill is automated, each team player shares the same goal, all the CI & CD processes are present, you will witness a successful implementation of DevOps methodology in the company.
Such an approach can cost a lot of money and effort if you decide to hire an in-house team - it requires setting up each process from scratch. The desire to shorten the time-to-market period and improve the SLDC may lead to outsourcing IT services.
Pros and Cons of DevOps Outsourcing
Let’s have a look at what benefits you can get from outsourcing and what kind of drawbacks you can face.
Benefits of DevOps Services Company:
- Access to expertise
- Good value for money
- Project management on the vendor’s side
- Mentorship for your in-house teams
Disadvantages of Outsourcing DevOps:
- Security issues - can be solved by cooperation with a reliable vendor
- Not the best option for short-time projects
DevOps Outsourcing vs Insourcing: Differences to Consider
Whichever variant you select - to outsource DevOps or have an in-house DevOps, accurate planning and qualified resources are the crucial parts of every option.
Hiring both outsourced DevOps and in-house DevOps has some strong points and drawbacks.
Among the advantages of an in-house DevOps team we define:
- Full control over every dimension of the product while developing.
- Specialists' addition for a controlled cost.
- An ability to build a required infrastructure without a necessity to adapt the partners’ toolset.
You also should be ready for such aspects:
- An in-house DevOps needs workplace costs and other staffing requirements.
- You will need more time to build an infrastructure and set up processes from scratch.
- The in-house team often works on the company's internal tasks, so it may lose focus, and project effectiveness may be reduced.
- On-site experts are used to repetitive tasks and working conditions, as a rule, they reduced the opportunity to perfect themselves in other directions.
- Sooner or later it becomes harder to take an objective point of view that may affect the quality of expert opinion.
Just as with in-house specialists, DevOps engineers outsource provides a number of advantages, such as:
- DevOps team has experience in working with different projects, so it can handle various troubles and unexpected situations.
- DevOps team provides high speed of deployment and doesn't need extra resources.
- If a company outsources DevOps it has fewer risks of staff turnover and separation.
- You are able to scale up and down without the administrative costs of hiring extra resources.
- DevOps team is interested in providing high-quality services for you to make you come back again.
- It is concentrated on reaching the specific result, confirmed by agreements.
Working with an outsourced DevOps team may involve certain risks, such as:
- In the case of complicated deployments, it may cost you more.
- You may have a situation when the vendor goes out of business.
- A necessity to build a communication process and working relationships from scratch.
What Is DevOps As a Service?
Can we speak about DevOps as a service as something different from the traditional practice of DevOps? DevOps aims at shortening SDLC, close aligning to business goals and removing any possible waste of time during the workflow. DevOps practices aim at wiping off any barriers between developers and operations engineers that take care of various phases of program development.
DaaS or DevOps as a service is a new term that means moving the infrastructure and all the means that are used by engineers to the cloud. An outsourcing company that offers DaaS can combine feasible development and testing methods for continuous integration processes.
There’s a service provider that provides DevOps services as a technology partner and lets you focus on business goals and processes.
What you get with DevOps as a service:
- Reaching a much faster SDLC
- Boosting deployment frequency
- More reasonable deployments
- Better alignment with business goals
- Reduction of waste of all sorts
The primary tasks that DaaS focuses on are flexibility, scalability, process automation, and reaching business goals.
How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps lifecycles whirl around agility and automation. Each phase of the process flow aims at closing the gap between development and operations.
Continuous Integration (CI) refers to the practice of frequent code-check-ins to a shared hub with automated software builds, driving more frequent releases and helping to catch possible integrations in the early phases of the development cycle.
Continuous integration, in turn, has led to the rise of Continuous Delivery, the ability to deploy all kinds of changes. Such changes include new features, bug fixes, experiments, and configuration adjustments into production (even into the users’ hands) in a safe, quick, and sustainable manner; this creates a faster development pipeline that leads to the deployment of changes in as little time as possible.
Continuous deployment allows validated changes to get automatically released to the users. There’s no need to schedule release dates. Developers get user feedback in a short time and solve problems with more agility and accuracy. The maximum efficiency of the process is achieved when there’s a rigorous and reliable automated testing environment.
When monitoring processes are automated, we deal with continuous feedback on the products and systems. Issues are identified in real-time, and devs are notified about them in a moment. This automation ensures good security and reliability of the system together with more agile responses.
DevOps as a service at Dinarys
Let’s have a close look at the DaaS delivered by Dinarys. Our team of DevOps has excellent expertise in eCommerce, GameDev, FinTech, and software development domains. We get a request from an outside company to develop solutions from scratch or migrate existing ones to the cloud.
When we receive a request from a small company, we usually start our work right away or within a few days. When we deal with enterprises, we may face legacy issues or the need to build a scope for a new project thoroughly. To make our cooperation efficient, it may take a few months for us to plan our work. We spend this time communicating with the outside company and finding the most appropriate solutions and means.
What comes next? We continue regular communication, and we offer to view the backlog to make sure the project is developing at the maximum speed. We can use Jira Confluence, Redmine, Hubstaff and other services for monitoring the process.
We have constant interaction with our client for a successful outcome; this refers to upgrading existing systems or environments and to crafting new solutions from scratch.
What do you pay for when you hire a DevOps outsourcing agency?
When you outsource DevOps services, you will have these results:
- Three times lower failure probability
- 24 times faster recovery after failures
- Unplanned work is reduced by 22%
- Rework is reduced by 5%
You also get access to a vast talent pool, and you are not limited to the ones in your location. Recruiting takes time, and there’s not always enough time for completing this task. It may take a few months before you find whom you need for your in-house team. Moreover, it may take a few days to find the right outsourcing agency and make an agreement.
The team will have your domain expertise. DevOps engineers should be focused on reaching business goals and providing solutions that will help you with this. If you sell cars, they should be aware of delivering or migrating your systems to the cloud that will help you increase sales.
The team has its own managers that deal with motivation and focus on results. Some HRs take care of a comfortable working environment, medical insurance and other administrative things that could make the work of DevOps engineers easy and fun.
You will also see a synergy of teams. You will notice that their soft skills are at the highest level and you like communication - it’s easy and fluent. For example, in Dinarys, we care about the qualification of our engineers in speaking different languages, developing the ability to describe the processes in simple words and spread the word about DevOps culture.
It’s also the technology that matters. You will get access to innovative and cutting-edge solutions that will let you benefit from such cooperation.
Also, one more thing that can be considered as a benefit is the cost. If we take Ukraine, you will pay less for DaaS compared to the UK. You don’t have to pay taxes, buy any hardware or software, find a working place and make it comfortable for the engineer. You pay only for the tasks that are completed and nothing more.
How Much Does DevOps Cost As a Service?
Price is the thing that is not universal for some sets of tasks. We can consider having a few variants like paying a subscription for maintaining the existing cloud solution, for building a new one from scratch or migrating it to the cloud.
When we talk about subscriptions, we mostly mean outsourcing companies that offer only off-the-shelf solutions that cannot fully satisfy the business needs of their clients. Other variants will lead to flexible pricing that depends mostly on the number of hours. An outsourcing company predicts the approximate number, and you note it down in the agreement.
Project complexity also influences the total cost. You may face the need to build a new infrastructure from scratch, migrate your system to the AWS cloud (AWS DevOps outsourcing is also a beneficial option), upgrade the current environment and so on. Each task requires a different number of DevOps engineers involved, and complexity levels are not the same.
How Much Will You Pay for DevOps As a Service?
You can hire a team and pay $100 per hour for the work of one engineer. The cost may vary depending on location and qualification level, and DevOps tasks.
What about the cost? Is it cheap or expensive? Let’s have a look at the average hourly rates in the US and Europe:
- US - $232
- Ukraine - $43.76
- UK - $87-100
You can hire 2–3 engineers at a median salary of $175k/year, not including benefits. It’ll take us a couple of months to get you running on Kubernetes. If you’re building your infrastructure from scratch, it might take you an entire year. Or you can cooperate with an outsourcing company as an intermediary between you and the team.
It’s good to find the estimate from a few outsourcing companies and the kind of qualification levels they offer. Of course, you will pay more for the work of engineers from the UK than for the work of DevOps from Ukraine.
Where Do You Find DevOps As a Service Company?
If you google DevOps as a service company, you will face the fact that they deal mostly with enterprises. What can you do if you are a startup, a small or medium-sized company? The first and most obvious thing to consider is viewing listing sites like Clutch and its alternatives. A significant advantage of these sites is the opportunity to see real reviews from clients.
Another variant is just in front of you. Here at Dinarys, we cooperate with small and medium-sized companies. Our DevOps team delivers high-quality services that are business goal-oriented. You can contact us to get assistance in solving any problems or in building a new project.
Must Read Info About Engaging with Outsourced Contractors
We’ve mentioned the key benefits that you get from cooperating with an outsourcing company. However, is it too good to be true? Some things are hard to predict if you have never worked with a remote team. Let’s have a close look at them and see if we can prevent them.
Low qualification. You may hear that you will work with the highest-seniority level engineers. However, in reality, you may face the need to deal with a newcomer that hasn’t gained any experience so far. Alternatively, it may be a person who only read some articles online about the DevOps workflow. To prevent this problem, you should check the proficiency of the engineers with whom you will work.
Poor communication. Being an excellent engineer is not enough. The philosophy of DaaS is based on constant communication. If you send a request, you may wait for a few days before your problem is solved; this can be risky for any business that operates online or interacting with customers online. To prevent this problem, you should analyze the first contact with the team.
What else to check:
- Can you use tracking software on your side?
- How much time will they spend on handling your requests?
- What means will they use for planning and managing the tasks?
- Is there a possibility to scale the team up or down?
- Who owns the code? Make sure to state it in the agreement.
Hire Your DevOps Team Here
We believe that DevOps culture is all about Lean principles and Agile methodology. They are all combined into a single unit that aims at shortening SDLC, close aligning to business goals and removing any possible waste of time during the workflow. DevOps practices aim at eliminating any barriers between the engineers that take care of various phases of software development.
Here at Dinarys, we are ready to have a chat or a live talk about any possible pitfalls and discuss how we can prevent them. We have result-oriented DevOps teams that are addicted to a specific philosophy and methodology. Our teams know how fast delivery can let you stand out among competitors. We’re here to assist you and let you get the most from our cooperation.