MindK has been providing outsourcing services for more than 11 years. In this time, we’ve completed almost 130 projects for clients from all over the world. We’ve seen how DevOps outsourcing services can improve time to market, reduce change failure rates, and boost application security. We’ve also seen how bad approaches can cost companies thousands upon thousands of dollars.
So if you’re still on the fence regarding DevOps outsourcing, the article will help you clear up:
- DevOps outsourcing vs in-house teams: differences to consider
- What to expect from DevOps-as-a-Service
- How to start DevOps outsourcing
DevOps outsourcing vs in-house team: differences to consider
DevOps methodology breaks down silos between your development and operations teams. It can help you automate processes, implement changes effectively and on schedule, speed up software delivery, and make the process more dependable.
When it comes to implementing DevOps practices, you have two choices – hire an internal team or use outsourcing services from a trusted provider. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
In-house DevOps team
| Benefits | Drawbacks |
| Complete control over each aspect of the product while developing. | Office costs, perks, and benefits. |
| Adding resources seems to be a controlled cost. | Hard to recruit and retain specialists in most areas across the US. |
| Build the infrastructure you need using the tools that you want to use. | Takes more time to set up the needed infrastructure and build processes from the ground up. |
| The team is typically distracted by the company’s internal tasks, thus losing focus and efficiency. | |
| In-house experts are accustomed to the same type of tasks and working conditions. Usually, they have limited opportunities to perfect themselves in other aspects. |
Similarly, the outsourcing option has its own benefits and drawbacks.
Remote DevOps team
Benefits | Drawbacks |
| Access to top-tier talent at a reasonable cost. | Complex deployments might cost more. |
| Experience in working with varied projects, thus able to handle different issues and unforeseen situations. | The provider may shut down its business. |
| High deployment speed without additional resources. Project management is performed on the vendor’s site. | Needs to set up the communication mechanisms from the ground up and develop good working relationships. |
| Lower risk of employee turnover and attrition due to high experience and mature DevOps culture at the provider’s company. | Inexperienced vendors might compromise the application security. |
| Can be scaled up and down with no administrative expenses of recruiting additional workforce. | |
| Motivated workers to deliver top-notch services to make you return for more. | |
| An outsourced team is focused on achieving the result defined by a contract. |
Ordering DevOps-as-a-Service from a reliable services provider is a perfect fit for software teams that don’t have time and/or expertise to manage a complicated application infrastructure, but need it as soon as possible. It frees up your best workforce to focus on what is strategically important for your business.
However, if you’re a fast-growing product company with more than 150 employees, your business infrastructure is likely to be more complicated. In this case, it’s better to start building an in-house team of DevOps engineers.
If your company has no necessity to build an internal DevOps team, here is what you’ll receive when opting for DevOps managed services.
Four main metrics improved by adopting DevOps. Source: 2022 State of DevOps report
What to expect from DevOps outsourcing services
The right DevOps partner can help your team achieve a faster time to market and increased profitability.
First of all, an outsourced engineer deals with implementing DevOps principles. The services are completely customizable for each client and project:
- Providing expert cloud services implementation and consulting;
- Automating development and production environments;
- Carrying out thorough disaster recovery plans;
- Migrating your application infrastructure into the cloud, or performing a cloud-to-cloud migration;
- Dockerizing and building apps, and so on.
It is just a small range of work the DevOps engineer can perform. Each project is unique, so the customer and DevOps service provider should talk through the scope of work and agree on responsibilities on a case-by-case basis.
Here’s what you get from this cooperation by default:
#1 Immediate access to top talent
When it comes to DevOps, an experienced specialist will cost you an arm and a leg. For the record, the average annual salary of a DevOps Engineer in the USA is around $105K. For comparison, a qualified DevOps specialist in Ukraine earns around $39K a year.
Almost half of recruiters find it problematic to hire a DevOps engineer. A quick search on LinkedIn reveals over 73 thousand open DevOps vacancies in the US. At the same time, there are only 41 thousand DevOps engineers, most of them already having a stable job.
The lack of local specialists and the increasing wages are two reasons why startups consider outsourcing their DevOps responsibilities. Companies providing outsourcing services typically have a well-established recruitment process to provide you with the most experienced specialists.
They also have access to a truly global talent pool. The Ukrainian market alone has over 4,600 DevOps engineers.
#2 Faster delivery of a better product
Outsourced DevOps engineers typically work in companies that breathe DevOps culture. Such teams are streets ahead, more cross-functional and productive. An experienced and well-coordinated team is able to shorten the development cycle, speed up recovery from failure, time-to-market.
A DevOps team provides you with constant monitoring, continuous testing, and automation, that improves the quality of the production code and the end product.
A good example is the Choo I Skyen project MindK worked on. Our development team built a SaaS member management system for Norwegian associations. Initially, the project used the LAMP stack. Our DevOps engineers migrated the project to a microservice architecture with minimal adjustments to the product’s code.
Thanks to Kubernetes and infrastructure as a code, we lowered the business expenses on dynamic workloads (operations that require lots of computational power for short amounts of time). The improvements made by our DevOps team reduced operational costs, improved development efficiency, minimized the number of bugs, and decreased downtime.
#3 Reducing risks and IT expenses
A trial and error approach with an internal DevOps engineer usually leads to a loss of time and money for a company.
A remote team of DevOps consultants, as a rule, takes on the financial risks of providing a service. It’s almost a guarantee that such a team has already engaged in a large number of different projects for companies in various industries. The more projects teams have completed, the more experience they can provide to each client with a better service. This allows them to be sure which tools and approaches work best for a particular project.
The potential risks of outsourcing can be foreseen and, most importantly, shared between you and the service provider. This means that with enough homework, DevOps-as-a-Service can be just as risk-free and beneficial for the business as an internal team.
All in all, DevOps outsourcing can provide you with immediate access to rare specialists with hands-on experience on multiple projects and infrastructure types. It can dramatically reduce operational and staffing costs. Finally, it can serve as a powerful catalyst for the transformation of your business to become more agile and remove organizational silos.
Implementing Devops-as-a-Service for a leading reputation management company in the US [read the case study]
How to start with DevOps outsourcing (the process we use at MindK)
In MindK, DevOps-as-a-service is an essential part of each of the 130+ projects delivered. To prove that there’s nothing difficult in delegating your tasks to a DevOps outsourcing company, here’s a sneak peek at the start of our collaborative process with clients:
Step 1: Analysis and recommendations
We analyze the current state, quality, and pain points of DevOps implementation in a customer’s IT infrastructure.
Based on the analysis, we draw a roadmap and recommend tools and processes to automate deployment cycles across the delivery infrastructure. The analysis also shows the number of resources needed to cover client demands: it may be either just one DevOps consultant for support or possibly a team of full-time DevOps engineers.
Step 2: Signing a contract
Together with the client, we agree upon the scope of work and terms, determine the responsibilities of the parties, work out the communication plan and confirm our arrangements with a support contract.
Step 3: Getting started
Our DevOps outsourcing company allocates an engineer (or a team of specialists) with an established DevOps stack. The aim is to support the client’s project and solve all the issues as agreed in the contract.
We assist a development team 24/7 to ensure flawless integrated functioning of the delivery pipeline automation cycle and adapt the automated deployment cycle to changes. The DevOps engineer contacts developers and other members of the customer’s team whenever necessary.
To provide a better service, we assign an Account Manager from our side. Clients can contact this person when they need to discuss any issues, changes, or improvements. Additionally, we provide monthly status reports and meetings dedicated to the planning of activities and work improvements.
Conclusion
DevOps outsourcing services give US businesses immediate access to scarce talent at affordable rates. Moreover, it provides all of the benefits associated with the DevOps approach – improved collaboration, faster time to market, fewer product defects, less maintenance time, and lower operational costs – without having to build all the processes from scratch.
Seven years ago, DevOps became an integral part of each and every project at MindK. Since then, our engineers have worked out a battle-tested combination of processes, tools, and approaches that deliver measurable results for our clients.
So if you need a DevOps consultant or an experienced team to take care of your project, you can always rely on MindK. Just fill the contact form and we’ll organize a free consultation with our DevOps experts.
