What DevOps as a service means, which DevOps work to outsource, how outsourced engineers fit with your developers, and how to avoid the common pitfalls.
Slow releases, fragile deployments and a single engineer who knows how the pipeline works are common signs a team has outgrown its DevOps setup. DevOps as a service brings in experienced engineers to automate builds, testing and infrastructure, without a long hiring process.
What is DevOps as a service?
DevOps as a service means an external team handles the automation that moves code from a developer's laptop to production. That includes CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, containers and orchestration, monitoring and release processes. The goal is faster, safer, repeatable deployments.
What to outsource
- CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps or Jenkins.
- Infrastructure as code with Terraform, Bicep or CloudFormation.
- Kubernetes and container platforms.
- Monitoring, logging and alerting.
- Environment management for development, staging and production.
- Cloud cost optimization and scaling policies.
Three ways to get DevOps help
- A project: a fixed scope, such as building a new pipeline or migrating to Kubernetes.
- A managed service: an ongoing team that runs and improves your pipelines and infrastructure.
- Staff augmentation: a dedicated DevOps engineer who joins your team and works in your sprints.
Many teams start with a project to fix the foundations, then keep a dedicated engineer through staff augmentation to maintain and improve it.
Pitfalls to avoid
- Pipelines and infrastructure living in the vendor's accounts instead of yours.
- No documentation, so nobody in house understands the setup.
- Automating a broken process instead of fixing it first.
- Treating security as an afterthought: secrets, access and scanning belong in the pipeline from day one.
- Measuring activity instead of outcomes like deployment frequency and failure rate.
What good looks like
After a solid DevOps engagement, every change goes through the same automated pipeline, environments are reproducible from code, deployments are routine rather than events, and your developers can ship without waiting on one person. See our outsourced DevOps services for CI/CD automation, pair them with cloud infrastructure management, and read about cutting cloud spend once your infrastructure is automated.
Ship faster with automated, repeatable releases
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