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Table of Content
Blog Summary:
This blog is a practical guide to how organizations can gain more control over their workflows by DevOps outsourcing services. It will also guide you on how your organization can benefit from outsourcing specific departments and decrease their administrative costs for in-house teams.
Table of Content
DevOps helps organizations achieve their primary goal of releasing higher-quality software in the market on time. However, recruiting an in-house DevOps team is tough for organizations in North America as it is ranked one of the most challenging IT roles in the area.
Yet, according to the Markets and Markets, DevOps market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 19.7% in the next five years till 2028.
The two biggest reasons for DevOps outsourcing are getting expert talent and cost-effectiveness. On one hand, a quarter of small businesses outsource to get expert talent.
On the flipside, more than half of them look to outsource for cost-effective solutions. Hence, managing the complexities of software product development without expert talent and higher costs compels them to outsource DevOps services.
In this blog, we’ll drill down more on the DevOps outsourcing strategies, benefits, practices, and models.
Let us explain how the development principles of DevOps bridge the gap between development and operations and impact workflows with the following example:
DevOps streamlines Amazon’s production pipelines and reduces release cycles, enabling rapid delivery of new code every 11.7 seconds on average. This signifies how essential DevOps is for accelerated and constant releases of reliable, faster, and quality software versions.
The automated software processes of DevOps minimize human errors, maximize efficiency, and provide better scaling tools for the future. The necessity of DevOps emerges because both small and large companies want to adopt an agile approach due to its Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).
CI/CD pipelines are the reason why organizations have been able to reduce their mean time to recover from downtime from 70 minutes to less than 15 minutes.
Automate the complexities of the software development lifecycle with DevOps.
A Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) of a DevOps project management includes a continuous process of planning, feedback, observing, operating, deploying, and testing. It simplifies task management, predicts errors before a crisis, and eliminates repetitions.
The result? Organized workflow and effective communication replace chaos and confusion among owners, employees, and customers. Organizations look to take advantage of outsourced DevOps services because they streamline the CI/CD pipelines under each phase. Here’s how:
The first stage of the DevOps development process requires an organization to plan and start writing the code for their project. Here, the outsourced DevOps team discusses your requirements and expectations with the stakeholders.
After that, they start an agile, continuous development process with code changes, adding new features, and addressing issues when required.
The lack of integration across all organizations with multi-code software environments is a significant issue. It pushes the teams to jump from one software to another, creating testing issues, slow processes, and disconnection.
Outsourced DevOps services bring the Continuous Development to the development cycles. These services allow the development teams to maintain a common repository accessible to the entire team. CD helps the teams update their code, and the repository automatically tests and verifies it.
Manual testing poses many obstacles while optimizing for DevOps. The speed and accuracy outsourced DevOps brings are nothing compared to manual testing. Since each code changes the database, DevOps uses the “shift left” testing approach.
The approach shifts the testing phases to the left and early in the development cycle. It uses automated testing tools like Selenium, TestSigma, and Eggplant to reduce time, effort, and delays.
If your company uses a particular developer script, you don’t have proper metrics to measure and improve the SDLC. In the previous testing phase, bug-free applications require a lot of quality checks. Continuous Monitoring under DevOps makes finding system errors like low memory or unreachable servers easier for any member.
DevOps engineers must go through the entire lifecycle to ensure high-performance levels to find potential bugs. Continuous Monitoring tools like Sensu, Splunk, and New Relic are used to track such metrics.
Continuous Feedback is when organizations must audit all of their entire software based on the insights received from social media and surveys. Insights from users are essential for delivering a standout product that users love.
Outsourcing DevOps services provide a structured approach for gaining and processing customer feedback through channels and tools like Pendo.
Continuous deployment is facilitated by informing everyone in the team about the areas that need improvement. It’s the most crucial phase of the cycle as it ensures that the final code is deployed on the servers.
With DevOps outsourcing, organizations can avail themselves of the benefits of agile processes for two prominent services:
In this stage, the goal is to ensure the deployed software runs smoothly and reliably in a production environment. Key activities include real-time monitoring, automated error detection and recovery, scalability adjustments, and security enhancements in DevOps.
Continuous Operations aims to minimize downtime, optimize resource utilization, and respond swiftly to any issues or changes. It allows organizations to deliver a seamless user experience and maintain the health of their systems throughout their lifecycle.
While building code, the data tier is still resistant and rigid. It’s challenging to feed and refresh data to the cloud from on-premise infrastructure. Often, in-house development teams reach a breaking point where they need a proactive plan to avoid outages.
If organizations don’t have automated data delivery, it creates agility problems, leading to slow delivery pipelines. Outsourced DevOps automation tools and services bring agility and focus on treating the data like the application code.
Since the philosophy of DevOps tracks each SDLC activity, it streamlines a software project’s development lifecycle. Both data and coding teams combine the performance and engineering of a software product.
An organization’s in-house team of DevOps engineers is an expensive investment. DevOps aims to bring a cultural change that breaks down the siloed architecture. However, since it’s not always practical and viable to achieve, they outsource these services.
So, implementing DevOps as a managed service makes sense for startups and business owners because it automates processes and speeds up software releases. They can implement timely changes by bringing dependency on each team member and lowering their administrative costs.
A 2023 DevOps report by Puppet shows that 80% of organizations feel that even if they have achieved team success by implementing DevOps practices, they have yet to achieve organizational success. This is another reason they should consider the following strategies for DevOps outsourcing.
Under this strategy, your DevOps outsourcing company will collaborate with your organization’s staff to develop, test, and deploy a cloud infrastructure. As a part of their end-to-end services, they will assist your organization in creating an entire DevOps workflow, including all four stages.
This strategy involves getting consultation services from your outsourcing partner. The engineers evaluate and measure your current process workflow and provide valuable insights and recommendations on the changes required. At the same time, they also assist you in implementing those changes that align with your business goals.
Under operations management, the outsourcing provider focuses on reducing the downtime during the maintenance of their operations. According to Straits Research, with the automated CI/CD tools market projected to reach USD 4,377.77 million by 2031, outsourcing automated processes produces higher-quality deliverables.
Another strategy is using outsourced DevOps automation services to automate testing environments. Your outsourcing provider will automate processes of the entire infrastructure to help you eliminate any hardware structure costs. It also includes automated scaling on-demand by automating the code changes in all the servers.
Hiring a dedicated DevOps engineering team is one of the most beneficial strategies. Your organization can hire engineers for a project from an offshore or nearshore outsourcing provider. Under this strategy, you have complete control over defining your requirements, objectives, team, infrastructure, and budget.
Choose an outsourcing strategy that works best for your organizational success.
Planning a robust DevOps strategy requires an elaborate knowledge of technical, operational, agility, and, most importantly, skilled DevOps engineers. For example, AirBnB faced operational challenges in gaining source control infrastructure. The lack of sync between their system and increased Git traffic posed difficulties for their team focusing on implementing new features.
So, AirBnB opted to utilize managed services of Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to maintain infrastructure control. The scaling capabilities of EFS and SQS of tens to thousands of commits per day helped them reduce operational load and brought reliability and value to customers.
Managed outsourced DevOps services will help you create a cohesive strategy for the development and operations teams.
Here’s how you will avail the benefits of DevOps outsourcing for your organization:
Giants like WhatsApp, Skype, Slack, and Opera have smooth business processes because they outsource all their IT services from remote workers and offshore DevOps providers. With the implementation of DevOps, the specialized skills of engineers allow you to take off the burden of hiring an in-house team.
Experienced DevOps specialists are costly. Glassdoor recorded a US DevOps engineer’s annual average salary as USD 1,05,000. According to LinkedIn, the ratio of vacancies to filled positions in the US for DevOps engineers is 73:41 (73000 vacancies and 41000 candidates).
It’s also the reason why many recruiters find it extremely challenging to hire them. Outsourcing companies have access to a global talent pool and a streamlined recruitment process to provide the best DevOps methodology for your roles.
DevOps provides the benefits of faster, more frequent, and shorter software delivery. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery are the two significant parts of a DevOps lifecycle. These two practices allow incremental changes in delivery, whether small or big. Thus, it also creates a feedback loop with immediate responses.
A trial-and-error approach with in-house DevOps engineers leads to more IT expenses. Instead of following that approach, an outsourced DevOps team takes all the organizational-related financial risks. The more experience and the number of projects, the more they can provide expertise and skill to each industry client.
This approach also gives more profound and informed insights into the practices and tools they need for a particular project. Most importantly, the project risks and costs can be foreseen, and the provider and client share those risks. Access to a highly experienced team enables you to work on multiple project infrastructures, reducing operational and administrative costs.
When implementing DevOps culture in an enterprise, the owners need to know what customers don’t want more than what they want. According to Stanford Research, even well-designed and executed projects witness only one-third of success.
If a project is not executed well due to the lack of expertise of a full-time DevOps engineer, the organization would have to invest more time and money and start the hiring process again. However, with an outsourced DevOps provider, your organization can hire a better resource with an advanced skillset.
Risk assessment is significant for maintaining a stable organizational IT infrastructure security system. Hence, it needs planning from all the teams involved. If crucial security issues remain undetected, they can pose serious issues in the later stages.
Manual detection of faulty meters, safety concerns, and downtime risks consume more time leads to monetary losses. However, a DevOps engineer enables you to work with an agile software development that minimizes such risks.
They can detect anomalies in the earlier development stages with automated Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms.
DevOps works on an agile approach. Under this approach, development teams create several iterations of a product and integrate feedback from earlier versions to improve the quality of succeeding versions. Moreover, some projects also require implementing features from third-party service providers.
Topdanmark integrated cloud migration, and DevOps modernization services to develop a self-help portal for their insurance services. Adopting DevOps helped them rapidly deploy new versions, achieving 100% automation and improved CI/CD efficiency for their servers.
DevOps is a vast field with specialists taking up multiple responsibilities, which vary for each project. These include rare ones, too:
Hence, building an in-house team becomes complicated as recruiting such professionals is challenging.
Whether a big company or a small business, your organization can benefit from forming a competent development team. Outsourcing DevOps services are beneficial for both. According to Zippia, the most common reason big US companies outsource is because it helps them save up to 90% of their labor costs.
On the other hand, 26% of small businesses with 10 or fewer employees outsource to get expert help. Since they track every step of the software development and delivery process, you have an equal opportunity to drive your business innovation.
The essential services that you can outsource when you hire DevOps engineers are:
The global DevOps outsourcing market is valued at USD 40.16 billion with a predicted annual growth rate of 4% till 2025. The US holds 38% of this market share with IT as the leading sector.
When you outsource DevOps services, your company will see:
But most of all, you would have synchronization of teams and a faster recruitment process than an in-house team. Hence, DevOps implementation poses two choices for the organizations – should they go with their in-house development team or outsourced DevOps teams?
Let’s take a look at this comparative table of what you get and what you pay for outsourced DevOps services:
| In-house DevOps Team | Outsourced DevOps Team | ||
| Pros | Cons | Pros | Cons |
| Internal control over each project aspect | Requires building infrastructure from scratch | Reduced costs for hiring top talent with extensive niche industry knowledge | Too many vendors to choose from which can create confusion |
| Control over expenses | More admin costs, especially for niche benefits | Additional resources and experience in a variety of projects | Need to set up infrastructure from scratch and maintain the same collaboration |
| Freedom to choose any tool with no adherence to the vendor’s toolkit | Time-consuming and costly hiring and training process | Domain expertise to handle unforeseen circumstances | Increased costs for complex deployments |
| Smooth communication and collaboration | Employee turnover and limited expertise | Easy to scale the teams up or down without extra costs | Outsourced talent won’t become an essential part of a team |
| Redistribute internal tasks as per roles | Shortage of local DevOps talent | Project management is carried out at the vendor’s site | Sometimes, vendors are unfair and may hide actual fees |
| Organization of workplace for new team members | Reduced risks of employee turnover due to a strong DevOps culture | ||
| Accustomization to similar tasks and lack of fresh ideas | Motivated teams, adherence to contract, and value for money | ||
Save admin and hiring costs with outsourced DevOps services.
Many organizations are outsourcing DevOps to leverage expertise and streamline their processes. However, successful DevOps outsourcing requires careful planning, analysis, and execution.
Let’s explore the critical steps to get started on the path to success.
Before diving into DevOps outsourcing, thoroughly analyzing your organization’s current state, existing processes, pain points, and objectives are essential. Engage your internal teams, including development and operations, to gather insights into what needs improvement.
Based on this analysis, you can develop recommendations to implement DevOps practices. Additionally, seek input from key stakeholders to ensure alignment with business goals. This initial analysis and recommendation phase set the foundation for a successful DevOps outsourcing journey.
Once you understand your organization’s current state, define your DevOps objectives. What specific outcomes do you aim to achieve through outsourcing?
Common DevOps objectives include:
Articulating these objectives helps your internal teams and potential outsourcing partners align their efforts with business goals.
Establishing a governance framework is crucial to maintaining control and oversight throughout the outsourcing engagement. Develop policies, processes, and guidelines to help implement and manage the DevOps practices.
Here are the essential elements of a governance framework:
A well-structured governance framework provides clarity and accountability, reducing the risk of misalignment and misunderstandings.
Selecting the right outsourcing vendor is a critical decision. Begin by identifying potential vendors through referrals, research, or industry events.
When evaluating vendors, consider the following factors:
Conduct interviews, request proposals, and perform due diligence to make an informed decision.
Once you’ve identified the right outsourcing vendor, it’s time to formalize the engagement through a contract.
Ensure that the contract is comprehensive and includes the following elements:
Review the contract thoroughly with legal counsel to safeguard your interests.
Effective communication is the bedrock of successful DevOps outsourcing. Collaborate closely with the vendor to create a detailed project plan.
This plan should include:
Ensure the outsourcing team has strong communication skills and can effectively engage with your internal teams.
Measuring and tracking DevOps performance leads to a robust monitoring and reporting system.
It helps track the following essential metrics:
Regularly review these metrics with your outsourcing vendor and adjust as needed to improve DevOps processes continuously.
Outsourcing DevOps may not be the best choice in specific scenarios:
Maintaining in-house DevOps capabilities in these situations could be more cost-effective and align with your business goals.
DevOps outsourcing models include hiring DevOps consultants for guidance, specialized tasks, or a dedicated team for ongoing support. It also includes the Managed Services model with a third party managing the entire DevOps process.
Choose the model that aligns with your organization’s specific needs and objectives:
Organizations can engage DevOps consultants on a short-term basis to assess existing processes, recommend improvements, and provide guidance. This model suits companies seeking expert advice to kickstart their DevOps transformation without a long-term commitment.
When specific DevOps projects or tasks require specialized skills, companies can hire DevOps developers on a project-based or temporary basis. These professionals focus on implementing and maintaining DevOps practices.
Some organizations opt for a dedicated DevOps team that works exclusively on their projects. This model ensures consistent attention and alignment with the company’s goals, making it suitable for long-term, complex DevOps initiatives.
Under this model, a third-party service provider manages the entire DevOps process, from strategy development to ongoing operations. It’s a comprehensive approach that allows organizations to outsource their DevOps needs entirely, often with a focus on cost efficiency and performance optimization.
Hitting the nail with the right outsourcing partner involves DevOps best practices to make it a long-term and resourceful partnership.
Clearly define your DevOps objectives, desired outcomes, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Ensure the outsourcing partner understands your unique business processes, culture, and values. Effective communication and alignment at the outset are crucial for a successful partnership.
While cost efficiency is a consideration, decisions regarding DevOps outsourcing should be more than just budget-driven. Prioritizing quality, expertise, and the ability to meet your DevOps goals is essential over simply choosing the lowest-cost provider.
DevOps is a critical component of software development and delivery, and focusing on long-term value rather than short-term savings is crucial.
Selecting a suitable payment model is another key consideration. Two standard payment models in DevOps outsourcing are fixed-price and Time-and-Materials (T&M):
DevOps outsourcing is not a one-time decision but an ongoing partnership. Implementing continuous monitoring and evaluation mechanisms is essential to promptly optimize and address any issues.
Identify potential risks associated with DevOps outsourcing and develop a comprehensive contingency plan. This plan should include mitigation strategies for common risks such as security breaches, communication breakdowns, and unexpected project delays. Being proactive in risk management helps minimize disruptions and ensures smooth operations.
Outsourcing DevOps can offer numerous benefits but presents several challenges.
Aligning the outsourcing partner’s technology stack with your own can be complex. Mismatched tools and platforms can hinder seamless integration and collaboration.
Ensuring the security of your systems and data can be challenging when outsourcing. A breach or vulnerability in the outsourcing partner’s infrastructure could have severe consequences.
Achieving consistency in tools and processes across distributed teams can be difficult. Differences in toolsets and methodologies may lead to inefficiencies.
DevOps as a Service (DaaS) costs can vary from scope, project complexity, vendor reputation, and location. Typically, DaaS providers offer tiered pricing models based on the client’s specific needs.
Engaging in a thorough discussion with potential DaaS providers and understanding their pricing structures is essential to determine the most cost-effective solution for your DevOps needs.
Moon Technolabs offers cutting-edge solutions to streamline your DevOps workflows. Our services of DevOps outsourcing include:
What can you leverage with Moon Technolabs’ solutions?
We tailor our services to fit your unique business needs, allowing you to efficiently scale and optimize your development process. With Moon Technolabs as your DevOps partner, you will increase efficiency, and accelerate time-to-market for your software products while maintaining high-quality standards.
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Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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