Practical Guide To Outsource DevOps Tasks For Your Project

Key takeaways

• Evolving business outsources DevOps since 2008. Know more about triggers and outcomes. 99% of respondents say it positively impacted their organization.
• 8 stages of DevOps workflow, methods, roles, and staff responsibilities.
• It’s not for everyone: check if your field is in a list among the most popular applications.
• Know blockers on the way of setting up an in-house team and how you can do it by outsourcing.
• Read more about the Aimprosoft experience that may help businesses reach the next level, leaving rivals behind.

Since 2008, DevOps as a service had shifted from a just philosophy to a practical methodology when dysfunction in the IT industry peaked. Velocity is what makers and acceptors appreciate. The first feel fatigued about endless manual iterations and uncontrolled errors. The second demonstrates a will to compete in the market. Where is DevOps there?

Later in 2018, Google revealed they run 500 million tests and over 4 million builds per day. DevOps is velocity. In their DevOps manifesto, the combination of software and automation was named SRE, or Site Reliability Engineer, known now as DevOps Engineer.

In this article, we will go through what DevOps outsourcing looks like, the roles and responsibilities of staff, which projects are reasonable to outsource, and how to build a legendary infrastructure as Google did.

Why is DevOps important?

Taking the leading role in the performance due to automation, Google reported in State of DevOps 2021 on the practices that drive successful software delivery and operational performance. Data collected for seven years involving 32 000 professionals showed growth of elite performers to 26%. That means a quarter reached a significant decrease in lead times for changes to production.

The old practice of having the developers who wrote the code work independently of the operations engineers who deployed and maintained that code has become obsolete. A recent DevOps Institute reported that 60% of organizations plan to onboard DevOps specialists or are on the way to doing it. Transformation to the DevOps model happens, and development and operations teams are no longer siloed.

DevOps is a practice that improves the work of development and operations teams by automating repetitive tasks in software delivery processes, enhancing communication and collaboration, and shortening the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

DevOps-oriented engineers are some kind of creators and maintainers being at the intersection of IT operations and software development. They understand what it takes to maintain IT infrastructure and are able to write code and deploy new services.

Every year, we continue to see how the industry evolves and accelerates the ability to deliver software with more speed and better stability. It is achieved through synergistic work both in delivery and operational excellence.

Security issues are also closely related to the speed of delivery. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in malicious attacks. Organizations are adapting and moving from reactive to proactive measures. Security measures are also part of the software supply chain and are part of DevOps (DevSecOps).

Of course, you can ignore the mood and climate in your team. But a healthy atmosphere has a much better effect on the productivity of team members and positive outcomes. Fewer obstacles and getting the results of work faster eliminate stress and negativity, thus motivating peers for more.

And answering one of the most popular questions: yes, DevOps can work with outsourced development.

How does DevOps outsourcing work to create additional value for your project?

The current industry demand for DevOps engineers outstrips the supply. The DevOps culture is based on lean and agile principles. Being very familiar with startups’ culture, these methodologies best fit their development style.

Aiming for shorter development cycles and increasing deployment, an outsourced DevOps engineer can significantly eliminate barriers between teams involved at different stages of SDLC.

The most popular outsourced DevOps services that can bring additional value to the business are:

• continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools, with a focus on task automation;
• real-time monitoring, incident and configuration management;
• collaboration platforms creation;
• massively scalable and distributed systems with cloud computing, microservices, and containers implementation;
• increased communications between IT groups;
• faster time to market/lead time;



• rapid improvement based on continuous feedback in the DevOps journey;
• zero downtime in the development process with a Blue-Green deployment;
• more accurate system performance due to less manual work and more automation;
• responsibility and code ownership in development results in better dev processes;
• possibility to distribute duties among broader specific roles for more accurate performance.

8 stages of DevOps workflow

Continuity defines a DevOps process when both development and testing activities are concurrent. Below, we are going to break this continuity down into the eight most common stages of many CI/CD pipelines to look at each closer.

DevOps methods

The most common methods a DevOps outsourcing company can provide to streamline your development and operation are as follows:

DevOps roles and responsibilities

The need for highly specialized result-oriented roles has increased in the last decade with the growing adoption of DevOps practices across organizations. It’s not about skill-centric separate departments with a lack of sufficient communication. We talk about niche specialists responsible for tasks within dedicated cross-functional teams.

Let’s explore roles and responsibilities across DevOps engineering.

DevOps roles

The DevOps Evangelist is a leader or person responsible for ensuring that DevOps approaches are applied throughout the product development process while ensuring positive changes in the operational environment.

The Release Manager coordinates and manages the product from development to deployment and is in charge of releasing new software in shorter increments to reach end-users faster.

The DevOps Automation or Integration Engineer is responsible for analyzing opportunities for automation and their applicability, designing and implementing a continuous deployment strategy for high-availability requirements in production and test environments.

The IT Operations Engineer handles deployment and management of applications and the infrastructure that hosts them and upholds the safety and internal regulations of the work environment to maintain the reliability of an entire infrastructure, equipment, and all system elements.

The DevOps QA Engineer is a part of the team in the Business Continuity, or Cybersecurity group that takes over comprehensive continuous testing and analysis aimed at finding opportunities to improve any of the functions to meet customer needs best.

The DevSecOps or Security Engineer monitors the health of the product, provides protection against external threats, and prevents the recurrence of any downtime or security risks.

The Configuration Management Engineer takes over the automation of mundane maintenance tasks to free up development time for actual programming and provides support for CI and deployment of several products across environments (datacenters and public cloud).

The DevOps Business Analyst is upfront in designing requirements to coordinate product development according to customer needs and changing markets.

Such a niche fragmentation of responsibilities is inherent in huge projects mostly, where the presence of the entire spectrum of specialists involved in DevOps is necessary. On small projects, most often, the duties listed in all these roles are performed by one or several people.

DevOps responsibilities

The widely-accepted responsibilities of a DevOps outsourcing team are:

DevOps expertise

The most suitable projects for DevOps

DevOps is evolving and will take more ground in 2022 and further. The emergence of technological innovations leads to entire market growth. The global DevOps market counted $7 bln in 2021, with the potential to reach $26 bln by 2027.

As Gartner states, the centerpiece of new digital experiences in 2022 and further will be the cloud, demonstrating $474 bln in revenue.

The choice of many is to adopt DevOps or die slowly.

We won’t allow this.

Let’s go through the examples of applications where DevOps play a crucial role:

1. Cloudification. Over 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025. Current projects require significant computing power at every stage of production. If you have ever thought about outsourced DevOps, cloud services under the right management will free your engineers from the need to build a complex internal IT system.
2. Big data. Since big data projects are mostly mission-critical and more challenging due to continuous query-response churns in massive data sets, it requires a specific optimization of the ongoing development processes.
3. Data Science. Data engineers collect data from many sources before changing it with the help of Big Data clusters and complex pipelines. According to McKinsey, companies that embedded DataOps with the Agile project management approach achieve a 50% increase in delivering new features.
4. Machine learning and deep learning. Building machine learning models is distinguished by their heterogeneous nature apart from being iterative. An outsourced DevOps developer (MLOps) assures massive compute infrastructure running with the best practices.
5. Telecom. Massive adoption of 5G by telcos means not only benefits such as the ability to test, deploy, and scale new services at hyper-scale velocity. The cloud-native core architecture can work only under the DevOps culture principles.
6. Internet of Things. Complex environments with a necessity to secure information coming from sensors and appliances require innovative maintenance techniques. A DevOps-led approach to IoT deployment bolsters the rigor of quality testing and accelerates the lead times.
7. Streaming. Seven in ten companies are spending up to 30% of their time on upgrades and updates. Failure tolerant systems, automation, and segmented networks as a part of DevOps can significantly improve the stability and upgradability of streaming services.
8. E-commerce. Manual management and inability to scale went to the past in Shopify since they approached adaptively scaling Kubernetes. Autoscaling allowed coping with a flux of occasional celebs-based sales and bearing the load on thousands of servers across multiple regions./li>

Blockers to in-house DevOps practice implementation

Despite the overwhelming DevOps adoption, a place for concern is here. 85% of leaders admit barriers to implementing DevOps in their organization, highlighting the technical, cultural, and organizational factors. The main reasons related to the hurdles are:

• legacy infrastructure;
• lack of relevant employee expertise and skills;
• losing the competition in salaries with companies of a high level of DevOps evolution;
• sub-optimal team definitions;
• lack of budget to hire DevOps professionals locally;
• organizational buy-in;
• limited-to-no automation;
• risk aversion;
• no adjustment to corporate culture;
• imperfect feedback loops.

At the same time, many decision-makers admit that the impact of DevOps is a blurry concept with difficulty to measure. This is mainly since many businesses are relatively new to DevOps with under three years of experience.

Have you ever thought about the impact you expect to get from implementing DevOps in your organization?

Do not despair. Obstacles can be overcome. The right people from the right company can create a culture that leads to successful DevOps implementation.

Benefits of DevOps outsourcing

Being good at automation does not make your organization good at DevOps. As stated in the recent report, despite the pretty high level of automation, 62% of companies confessed they are stumped on their DevOps adoption somewhere in the middle of an evolution. But what are the real benefits of it, then and why should a company use DevOps services outsourcing?

Apart from figures, a DevOps outsourcing partner is featured with the following bonuses:

1. Access to the top DevOps talents who are hard to onboard with no steps in DevOps before.
2. Broad expertise at an affordable price without domination in your projects.
3. Long-standing DevOps culture within a team with more profound peer-to-peer training and support.
4. No in-house challenges related to recruiting, training, spending, and benefits.
5. Shorter development cycles under the perfected over the years best DevOps practices.
6. Improved quality and flexibility with less responsibility for providing tools and resources.
7. Better control of risks and recoveries from exerts immersed better that newbies in the field.

Drivers of local salary raise and cost of DevOps outsourcing

When choosing a service provider, the price plays a prime role apart from solving current urgent problems.

Let’s consider the state of compensation for DevOps services in different countries based on Talent, Glassdoor, Erieri, SalaryExpert, and Pilot.

Rapid digitization in 2020 led to salary increases for DevOps specialists. For example, over a third of the USA employees have compensation from $150,000 and $250,000 per year. At such prices for professional services, it is difficult for companies to get accelerated with automation, even with obvious benefits from DevOps in the long run.

Besides an experience level, the application area also affects payment for services. After the pandemic, the top earners are distinguished experts in the fields of life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and healthcare. However, the rest of the industries don’t fall behind either.

Swedish specialists in CI/CD are near the same salary bracket as in the USA, with $120 000 for the middle DevOps engineer and $137 000 compensation per year for senior levels. Canada starts with $110 000 on average for middle specialists, moving to $156 000 for seniors per year. By the way, the biggest increase in DevOps salaries is observed in Japan, lifting the mark of $90 000 per year with the greatest $189 000.

In the United Kingdom, the DevOps Engineer, on average, makes up £60 000 per year while most experienced workers make up to £80 000 respectively. €66 500 on average and €83 500 on maximum a DevOps professional is expected to get from their employer in Germany. The average pay for a DevOps Engineer in Finland is €70 000, reaching €86 500 maximum.

In some countries, hourly rates are relatively low, but there still remains a problem of how to hire DevOps developers with relevant expertise and seniority level locally. Moreover, benefits, additional compensation, and remuneration costs may be too high for employers.

Assume you need to set up a CI/CD for ongoing automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of applications based on a site reliability engineering (SRE) approach. DevOps integrated into the agile process requires relevant specialists for the entire project life cycle: from integration and testing to delivery and deployment.

If you’re serious about evolution, the total annual spending may scare you.

For that reason, Ukraine is considered one of the most favorable destinations to outsource DevOps services. In this region, you can find DevOps experts in all application areas. CI/CD development outsourcing in Ukraine has competitive cost pros. Middle-level positions will cost you $40-45 per hour and $50-60 for a senior-level position. In terms of value, they are not inferior to talents from your local tech pool and are available for an affordable price, though.

Other outsourcing destinations that attract outsourcers by time zone, culture fit, proximity, or other similarities are well-known Poland, the Czech Republic, India, the Philippines, Latin America, and North America as nearshore locations.

In addition, if you outsource, DevOps engineers will complete your niche skill shortage (we wrote above in the section about responsibilities), which can also affect rates. We recommend discussing it with your technological partner.

How to start DevOps outsourcing?

Well, you understand that your problems fell under development operations, and you’re ready to outsource DevOps tasks to an external agency. Where to begin?

Define tasks

Define tasks with your confident tech lead or person in charge of business delivery improvement to outsourcing. It is always easier to start searching for a partner with documented requirements. Otherwise, you can create a go-forward plan with a dedicated DevOps auditor from Aimprosoft.

Opt for an outsourcing destination

Choose the outsourcing destination based on your preferences: time zone, deep domain expertise, specific skills, proximity to the tech hub, price for services, language of communication, etc.

Search for a partner

Source potential hires or an outsourcing partner from B2B directories, freelance platforms, and GitHub. The overall picture with feedback from clients, portfolios, the company’s blog, and publications in the media space can help you get an accurate opinion about the outsourcing provider.

Interview vendors

Set up an interview with shortlisted vendors from the pool of chosen companies. An outsourcing model is good because you don’t need to waste your time interviewing each candidate. The responsibility for the delivered result is under the vendor’s shoulders. It is essential to feel the synergy with a partner so that you will not yield a single centimeter to your competitors.

Try out your DevOps

After the long selection, you can finally sign a contract to start your way of evolution. Now is the time for hired professionals to strive on the DevOps roadmap, production support, infrastructure upgrades, research of new tools, and other tasks that before were disregarded.

How can the Aimprosoft DevOps outsourcing team contribute to your project?

When we meet clients first, they are often somewhat tired: from the endless strife between the development and operation teams and the amount of routine manual work that the system administrator cannot change. Customers who are ready for innovation do not know how to deal with these technologies and how they will then manage their systems.

There are many factors. That is why Aimprosoft has grown a whole DevOps team with extensive experience in building infrastructure, which can become an integral part of your internal team. As a result, our customers get faster execution of the planned work (for example, high deployment rates) while increasing the reliability, stability, stability, and security of the production environment.

Successful collaboration between developers and IT departments under the principles of DevOps leads to the value stream, which is between the business, where the requirements are defined, and the customer, where the result is delivered, is implemented with the greatest positive result.

Projects for which Aimprosoft has been bringing value for over six years are from the following domains and applications:

You can order consulting/outsourcing services under the staff augmentation, dedicated team, or within a full-cycle development and relevant seniority level.

Our DevOps proved their resilience. Aimprosoft’s entire IT infrastructure is cloud-based and located in Germany. Despite the force majeure related to the war, we have been continuing to work at full.

Adapting to the new force majeure circumstances related to the war, 100% of our employees returned to work at full capacity in March. It was a real test for the character, but we overcame the expected difficulties. Now located in safe areas within the country (Ivano-Frankivsk) and abroad, we go on demonstrating our high responsibility and fulfilling commitments before our clients. Aimprosoft is proud of the 100% retention of our clients. The renewed hiring in April 2022 helped to meet the demand for new contracts.

Conclusion

There is no script for DevOps in today’s fast-paced transforming world. Each company writes its own. You will undoubtedly win in the long run with a DevOps outsourcing company. The role of people and culture is no longer minor as the importance of automation and the cloud. Contact us if you are ready to go ahead.

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