Outsourced DevOps: Do You Know The Pros And Cons?

When you consider all the challenges of building your own DevOps team, outsourcing DevOps like a managed service makes a lot of sense – especially for early-stage companies and entrepreneurs. As with marketing, graphic design, or legal counsel, outsourcing gives you specialized skills without the financial and organizational costs of bringing these services in-house.

That said, Managed DevOps isn’t a good choice for every situation. In this blog, we explore the potential drawbacks and five significant benefits of outsourcing DevOps.

3 Signs Outsourcing DevOps Might Not Be For You

Before you decide that Outsourced DevOps is the way forward for your company, consider whether any of these potential drawbacks apply to your situation:

1. You Have Dedicated Access To Full-Time Personnel

If you hire your own team, you have 40+ hours of their time every week, and you get to decide how and when to use their skills. This probably isn’t an issue for early-stage companies and entrepreneurs, but it may be better for larger companies to build in-house DevOps teams.

If your company has 150 employees and is growing to 500 and beyond, consider building DevOps in-house. At that point, your infrastructure has grown to such a size that you’re going to need people to own various parts of it.

2. It’s Harder To Integrate DevOps Into Your Culture

Generally speaking, hiring DevOps professionals allows you to integrate them more deeply into your company culture. Compared to outsourced people, other team members might be more willing to collaborate with full-time DevOps employees.

Integration is a double-edged sword, however. If you don’t have a culture that resonates with DevOps and in which a junior person has a say in important decisions about moving a project forward, integrating DevOps professionals into your culture becomes a liability, not an asset. Before deciding to build your own team, you may also wish to consider strategies for integrating outsourced people into a consistent relationship.

3. Software Architecture Is One Of Your Key Market Differentiators

For some companies, software architecture is an essential differentiator. If the mechanics of delivery are essential to your company’s business, it may make sense to take on the challenge of building a robust internal DevOps team.

If expertise in cloud architecture and delivery is only tangential to your business, however, you’re probably better off treating DevOps as a managed service and outsourcing it.

5 Benefits Of Outsourcing DevOps

Unless there’s a clear need to build an in-house DevOps team, your company stands to reap considerable benefits from an outsourcing approach. These benefits include:

1. Immediate, Uninterrupted Access To Top DevOps Talent

If cloud software architecture isn’t part of your core business model, it’s difficult to attract the best DevOps engineers. A reputable Managed DevOps provider, however, has the right company culture and resources to attract – and retain – the top talent, since their entire mission is aligned with DevOps. Outsourcing with such a provider gives you better capabilities, while eliminating many headaches of building your own team.

2. Expertise At A Lower Cost

With outsourced DevOps, you get a fully functional DevOps team with varied skill sets, at a fraction of the cost of finding and hiring even a single full-time employee. This team provides the DevOps and cloud infrastructure expertise you need, without having an in-house team that monopolizes your company’s time and resources.

3. The Vendor Provides A Strong DevOps Culture

The best DevOps engineers want to be part of a great team, playing off each other like a sports team or musicians in a killer band. If you hire a DevOps engineer on your own, that person doesn’t have peers to lean on when they get stuck. A Managed DevOps provider offers a deeper pool for peer-to-peer education and mentoring, which builds strong team dynamics and makes individual engineers smarter and more effective.

4. Flexibility To Find The Best Fit

If an outsourced vendor sends you a DevOps engineer who seems like a bad fit or lacks a certain critical skill, there’s no problem. You just ask the vendor to get you someone else. With a full-time employee, you don’t have that kind of flexibility. Finding an engineer who’s a better fit would mean spending even more time and money on termination, severance, and legal issues, and starting the hiring process all over again.

5. Controlling The Costs And Risks Of Technology R&D

DevOps engineers and Solutions Architects need to constantly experiment to keep your architecture robust and scalable to deliver technology and cost advantages to your business. They need to keep their chops up with ongoing learning and play.

With an in-house team, you’d pay them to experiment on your product or conduct additional research and development (R&D). With outsourcing, you’re not paying for that time directly, which means you get the benefits of DevOps experimentation at a fraction of the cost.

When you outsource DevOps, the engineers are already getting on-the-job training in areas outside of what you’re doing by working with the vendor’s other clients. In other words, other clients are paying for the de facto R&D, which lowers your cost and risk when implementing new technology.

For many businesses, Managed DevOps provides the expertise you need, while eliminating the burden of hiring and maintaining an in-house team. As a result, you have more time and resources to focus on what matters most: building your business.

Want to hear more about Managed DevOps and find out if it’s the right solution for you?

FAQ

• How does integrating outsourced DevOps teams with in-house development teams typically unfold, especially regarding communication and project management tools?

Integrating outsourced DevOps teams typically involves establishing clear communication channels, defining shared goals, and leveraging collaborative tools like JIRA, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. Effective integration also depends on meeting regularly and ensuring both teams are aligned on project management methodologies and tools.

• When selecting a Managed DevOps provider, what specific criteria should companies use to ensure alignment with their business goals and technical needs?

When selecting a Managed DevOps provider, companies should consider the provider's experience in their industry, technical expertise, ability to scale, security practices, and customer references. It's crucial to ensure the provider's approach to DevOps aligns with the company's business objectives and technical requirements.

• Are there particular success stories or case studies of companies that have significantly benefited from outsourcing their DevOps, detailing the challenges faced and the solutions provided?

Success stories of companies benefiting from outsourced DevOps often highlight improved deployment frequencies, better scalability, enhanced security, and cost savings. Challenges such as cultural alignment, communication gaps, and initial integration efforts are commonly addressed through strategic planning and ongoing partnership management.