DevOps as a Service - Buyer's guide

Introduction

DevOps is a relatively new approach to software development and infrastructure management. It helps make the development process predictable and efficient. However, few organizations can implement DevOps effectively, and the results are often unsatisfactory for the majority. Select companies can help your organization successfully implement it.

When appropriately implemented, DevOps significantly improves software delivery speed and efficiency. Read on to discover how to make informed decisions for your organization’s success.

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Four aspects of DevOps

DevOps is arguably a software development lifecycle (SDLC) and infrastructure management methodology. It uses combinations of tools and processes to help instill a cultural mindset for efficiency, streamlined cooperation, reasonable transparency, and unified teams. Let's look closer at those four aspects of DevOps.

1. Automation: Repetitive tasks take up a significant portion of the SDLC process, cause human error, and destroy the stability of the pace at which teams can achieve otherwise. Automation solves these problems all at once.

2. A collaborative culture: This is ensured by breaking down silos and enhancing cooperation across all levels ensuring open communication and teamwork.

3. Feedback loop: Without automation and CI/CD pipelines, vital statistical information about failures and successes would not be collected, making continuous learning an unbearable challenge for most people. A feedback loop ensured by DevOps adoption speeds delivery, stabilizes infrastructure, and improves software quality.

4. Efficiency and transparency: These are achieved by promoting trust among team members and stakeholders and unlocking clear visibility into processes.

Transformative Benefits of Implementing DevOps

DevOps brings a multitude of benefits to your organization. Let's explore a short list of those.

1. Predictability, Productivity, and Innovation: DevOps introduces predictability to organizational workflows, significantly enhancing team satisfaction and fulfillment among engineers. With streamlined processes, planning at all levels becomes more manageable, leading to increased opportunities for innovation. Additionally, the elimination of management bottlenecks further boosts productivity.

2. OPEX and CAPEX cost cutting: DevOps streamlines infrastructure change management, leading to significant reductions in operational costs. Automation minimizes unnecessary managerial overhead, improving efficiency. By reducing context switching, DevOps enhances overall productivity and resource utilization.

3. Improved quality and faster problem resolution:  CI/CD and other automation pipelines expose issues early in the process, making knowledge gaps visible to the team. This transparency encourages necessary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. The frequent release cycles foster an environment where bugs are quickly identified and resolved, leading to higher-quality, bug-free releases.

Agile and DevOps

DevOps originated as an extension of Agile but has since evolved into a more comprehensive approach. While Agile traditionally focused on the software development lifecycle, DevOps now includes infrastructure management, thanks to the rise of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), making infrastructure management align with Agile development practices.

Agile prioritizes rapid customer interaction and adapts to shifting requirements. In contrast, DevOps takes a more holistic, internal focus, extending beyond software development to all processes within the organization. For example, hiring and firing processes can be automated and integrated with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) tools, indirectly linking them to the software development lifecycle.

DevOps practices

Historically, development teams depended on operations engineers for infrastructure changes and automation. DevOps merged these two practices, eliminating communication bottlenecks and the vertical nature of communications. However, many companies still form separate DevOps teams and task software development squads to fire requests to this shared team. This approach undermines the primary benefit that Agile brings to software development: the ability to measure team velocity. The centralized DevOps team operates as a black box with unpredictable priorities and estimates; thus, if a development team relies on external DevOps activities, their estimations also become inaccurate and unpredictable.

Google proposed the SRE model for DevOps, which has evolved into a distinct philosophy by introducing many new perspectives on automation and other practices. However, the main idea suggested by SRE is that having knowledge and expertise within the development team is essential. In other words, each development team should have resources responsible for automation and infrastructure management for the services they own. From a team management perspective, this approach is logical, as it helps form an efficient team of engineers who can interact quickly and constantly share the same context regarding code and infrastructure specifics.

Indicators you need DevOps

There are clear signs that DevOps can drastically improve the efficiency of your SDLC. Skip-level meetings are great for capturing the following practices and ensuring that you adopt DevOps.

1. Manual deployments are slow, unpredictable, and, most importantly, depend on a single person. Everyone else involved treats it like dark magic. No one wants to learn the deployment steps, especially when those steps frequently change and never work smoothly. DevOps ensures automation through well-known tools. When appropriately implemented, automation pipelines can be easily handed over to new engineers.

2. Unpredictable obstacles are common in your deployment process. Each deployment brings a new set of people to communicate with, new topics for discussion, new approvals required, and so on. DevOps fosters transparency through constant communication, which better prepares your organization for deployment processes. People learn their roles in advance, understanding the entire process.

3. Infrequent deployments are another indicator that your organization needs DevOps. DevOps shortens and stabilizes the intervals between deployments, helping to create a deterministic workflow. Engineers can tackle small sets of problems with less disruptive context switching.

4. Minimal quality communication occurs when engineers don’t understand the entire deployment process and don’t act as a cohesive team. Management often blames engineers due to a lack of actionable information and insufficient insights for feedback. Messy issue-tracking boards, long-lived, personally owned, and unmerged code version control branches, and instant messaging channels filled with false positive alerts addressed to everyone but no one in particular, assuming any alerting system is set up at all are clear signals you need DevOps to convert interaction to a deterministic model and increase the communication efficiency and quality.

Why should you buy DevOps as a service?

In the emerging industry of modern software engineering, most of companies do not have experiance and knowledge enough to identify and grow the proper DevOps talent. Let's review several aspects of choosing DevOps as a service versus homegrown talent.

1. Tailored skillsets: Unlike other software engineering disciplines, DevOps is relatively new and remains in a phase of rapid changes. The term DevOps is overloaded, and many branches of DevOps are not necessarily needed in your company. Data engineering, CI/CD, Cloud Engineering, IaC, Observability, and others are branches of DevOps. It is hard to identify the proper T-shaped talent unless you already have substantial DevOps resources. DevOps agencies also specialize in identifying and growing DevOps talent based on constantly monitored market trends. They also provide consulting services to estimate your needs before proposing DevOps engineers with specific skill sets.

2. Talent growth: From the talent growth perspective, DevOps agencies are significantly more efficient as DevOps engineers within the agencies constantly share their experiences and learn from each other not just hard skills but, most importantly, the soft skills required to become a bridge between the teams and between the engineering workforce and the business decision-makers.

What will you get?

Outsourcing DevOps is especially critical for startups, as it significantly reduces the burden of managing technical activities related to software development and infrastructure. Here are some key benefits you’ll gain:

1. Focus on core business: Outsourcing DevOps allows startups to focus on business-critical actions and what sets them apart while delegating niche technical tasks to experts with proven experience in solving similar challenges for other companies.

2. Cost savings: Infraheads, for instance, has never encountered a case where cloud costs weren’t cut by at least 20%. In many cases, the savings outweigh the price of the service itself. Additionally, outsourcing reduces the risk of hiring underqualified staff, saving time and resources.

3. Access to top talent: DevOps agencies offer highly skilled professionals with broad experience across various teams, cultures, and skill sets. These experts bring fresh perspectives, unencumbered by internal biases or legacy relationships, helping to drive innovation and new ideas.

4. Lower HR expenses and flexible budgets: Outsourcing reduces human resource overhead and allows for more flexible budget planning, as you only pay for the specific expertise you need.

5. Continuous growth and innovation: DevOps agencies like Infraheads carefully select top talent and foster an environment where engineers can thrive. These engineers are proficient with the latest tools and contribute to their development. This culture of growth ensures that your organization benefits from continuous market research and tool discovery without extra effort.

Onboarding flow

The recommended onboarding flow involves hiring a DevOps architect first and supporting him/her in the initial stage of architectural discovery. The result should be a detailed document outlining the changes required in the organization, the skills needed for that, and the quantity of the workforce. Remember, DevOps is an overloaded term. Engineers specialized in cloud engineering, observability, containerization, CI/CD, and data engineering are all called DevOps, and only a seasoned architect can help you correctly identify the T-shaped engineers you need. Once the architectural discovery is made, you will need Cloud and CI/CD engineers first. Expect significant cloud cost cuts at the early stages of DevOps adoption, especially if developers manage your cloud infrastructure. Keep an eye on that and raise questions if that does not happen.

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