Getting value into the hands of your customers should be the top priority of any organization. No matter what your industry is. So, how can DevOps managed services benefit you and your team?
It’s all about delivery SPEED! and other stuff…
As an engineering leader, you’ll likely have a number of stakeholders breathing down your neck. C-suite, VPs, even Product Managers – they all want to see new features and updates get out the door as fast as possible. But we all know how that throwing something out into the wild and crossing your fingers isn’t a viable strategy.
This is why tech leaders everywhere are adopting DevOps into their delivery lifecycle. It allows the delivery teams to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase collaboration between the teams.
If you’re a tech leader looking to adopt Devops into your delivery, then this article is for you. We’ll do a quick dive into DevOps managed services and the benefits of getting a third party to help you with your journey to leveraging the practice.
Here’s a peek into what we’ll cover:
- What is DevOps?
- Benefits of DevOps managed services
- Disadvantages of outsourcing DevOps
What Is DevOps?
Firstly, let’s dive into what DevOps is as a practice. DevOps is a software development approach that emphasizes collaboration and communication between software engineers and other roles across teams.
The goal of DevOps is to improve the speed and efficiency of software development while also improving the quality of the end product. It integrates both development and operations teams into a single cohesive unit, allowing them to collaborate more effectively and quickly deliver high-quality products.
From a high-level, here are the key components of DevOps:
- Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD)
- Automation
- Source code management
- Infrastructure as code
- Containerization
- Monitoring.
We’ll flesh out each of these components in separate articles (yes, DevOps is a big topic!). Each of these components play a key role in leveraging the benefits of DevOps as a practice for your development.
What are the Benefits to DevOps Managed Services
There are many ways to implement these practices into your delivery lifecycle. One way is to look to vendors with DevOps experience to help implement the practice and manage the core components.
Here are the most common benefits of working with a vendor for your DevOps needs:
Improved Efficiency
With outsourced DevOps you can offload the burden of improving the efficiency of your feature delivery. They’ll provide services such as automation, CI/CD pipelines, source code management, containerization, and monitoring. These will all help your team improve their efficiency. Streamlining your deployment and improving your delivery lead times. Eliminating a lot of the manual tasks of getting to production.
Reduced Costs
Reduce your costs and make them more predictable. Managed service providers will find ways to reduce the ‘leakage’ in your deployment lifecycle. Looking for opportunities to automate manual processes and reduce the overhead of manual intervention. They should also be able to find areas for cost optimization through architectural design and have experience leveraging cloud services for maximum ROI.
Increased Collaboration
Managing your DevOps practice through a third party also helps to bring an unbiased perspective on improving your value delivery. While internal teams may have misaligned goals and objectives, you can rely on your DevOps provider to focus on improving your core delivery metrics.
Quicker Implementation
Get your delivery lifecycle to where you need it to be, faster. A managed services provider will bring with them implementation experience and likely some pre-canned solutions that they can tailor to fit your business needs. This will help your team get up to speed faster, reach your KPIs sooner, and allow your team to focus on other areas.
Improved Quality
Through automation with DevOps, you’ll start to improve the quality of your development. Catching bugs and errors through automated process. Holding releases until they’ve passed automated testing to avoid deploying defects into production. Your managed services provider should be there to show you the value that they’re providing and improvements over time. For example, through a reduction in defects to production.
Enhanced Security
Offload your risk to your managed services provider. By handing over the responsibility of security – you can rely on your provider to identify threat exposure, prioritize critical issues, and continuously monitor your infrastructure. If you’re in a highly-regulated industry such as finance or health, then this can relieve a massive burden from your shoulders.
Disadvantages of outsourcing your DevOps
While there are a number of benefits, there are some disadvantages depending on your business goals, size, and needs.
Dependency
It’s important to remember that the advantages of having a DevOps managed service provider may be so great that it presents a potential dependency on them. This can become a constraint if your team is not up-skilled as part of the managed services engagement. So, ensure to find a vendor that prioritizes documentation and education of your in-house team.
Vendor lock-in
Depending on your vendor, you may find yourself in an engagement with a high cost to switch. Ensure that you find yourself a vendor that can provide the flexibility that you require for your business. Typically service providers managing enterprise customers will be used to creating longer term and high ticket contracts for their large clients.
Cost
Just like any other service, you’ll get what you pay for. If you want to enjoy all the benefits of managed services as outlined above and have a strong partner in your cloud journey, it likely won’t be cheap. The question is – how much is that value worth to you and your business? If you are able to get features to customers faster leading to increased customer retention, higher customer acquisition, and increased lifetime value (LTV) – then what is that worth to the business? The reduced cost that a quality managed services provider gives you may in some cases even be enough to offset the cost of the services contract.
Conclusion
DevOps managed services as with any outsourced service, is there to reduce your stress and make your life easier. If you’re looking to improve your development lifecycle, improve your feature lead time, and improve the overall quality of code being deployed to production – then it could be time to adopt DevOps. While having a managed services parter along your side can be hugely valuable, there’s also some potential disadvantages to take into consideration.
Make sure to think about which benefits are important to you:
- Efficiency
- Cost
- Collaboration
- Speed of implementation
- Quality
- Security
While also taking into consideration some of the drawbacks:
- Dependency
- Vendor lock-in
- Cost
Above all, the key is to find a partner that puts your customer relationship first. The other components will be figured out, but without a strong working relationship – everything else falls apart.
If you’re looking to adopt or improve the DevOps practice in your engineering group, reach out to us at Autimo. We’ve a number of different managed cloud operations models to fit most businesses. If you want to know more, we can have a quick chat and we’ll let you know whether we’re the right vendor for your needs.
