As a CTO or VP R&D, there comes a point where you identify the need for a DevOps Engineer. This may be due to bad infrastructure performance, security breaches, high infrastructure costs, inefficient CI/CD, and many other reasons.
So, you decide to empower your team with a DevOps Engineer – what comes next?
Based on your workload, your budget, and the time you can afford for the recruiting process, you need to choose between two options:
- DevOps employee
- Outsourced DevOps provider
Let's review these two alternatives:
Full-time DevOps Engineers
When you first consider getting DevOps on board, hiring an employee seems like a great option. Your team receives a full-time DevOps engineer with the ideal set of skills to feed your vision. Unfortunately, this perfect scenario is disturbed by many challenges. Here are the main challenges that come with hiring a full-time DevOps engineer:
1. Long recruiting period
Recruiting a tech talent in general, and specifically a DevOps engineer - can take several months due to the shortage of Human Resources. Furthermore, looking through resumes and conducting interviews take away significant time you could spend instead on team management and other high-level tasks.
2. Incomplete technology stack
Even if you hire a highly trained and experienced DevOps engineer, they still may not be familiar with your required Tech Stack. They may not be familiar enough with the cloud well-architected framework to ensure your environment is secure, optimized, and cost-effective. They may not have the coding background to adopt the benefits of Python or Terraform or the knowledge of Kubernetes or Dockers to automate the deployment of containerized applications. It is unreasonable to expect one engineer to know all these technologies.
3. High salaries
Hiring a full-time DevOps engineer can be extremely expensive - up to 200k USD a year. This amount may significantly impact your burn rate, and you may have second thoughts about looking for an alternative. This is especially relevant if you are an early-stage start-up with limited resources. But, eventually, making accurate staffing decisions is a critical factor in building a team that can make a difference.
4. Low Flexibility
For many companies, the workload doesn't justify recruiting a full-time DevOps Engineer. You may feel more comfortable having talent physically present in the office, but it may not be the best for your workload and budget. If you closely analyze your needs, you may need a DevOps engineer for only 25% or 50% of the time. But while looking for a DevOps engineer, you will not find any candidate looking for less than a 100% employment position.
5. Single point of failure
If you have a single DevOps engineer, you rely on them entirely for your product's uptime, CI/CD and other crucial DevOps practices. This is risky since no human is infallible. If they were sick, on vacation or decided to resign – the entire DevOps functioning would come to a stop.
6. Outsourced DevOps
Once you review these negatives, you're already rethinking this alternative. Your next move would be to google "DevOps professional services". During your market research, you will probably encounter several types of outsourced DevOps providers:
- Cloud Resellers
- Outsource DevOps Consultants
- Remote offshore teams
However, they come with their own set of challenges. Here are the main pain points of CTOs who work with outsource service providers:
7. Low Responsiveness
When you hire an outsourced DevOps consultant, you usually expect them to build your infrastructure and handle your DevOps workload.
The problem is that they have many clients to respond to – you are only one of them. So it is a huge problem if your DevOps functioning stops. But they split their time and attention amongst several clients; they will only be able to make the required progress when your place on their queue arrives.
By the time they return, your frustration will only increase.
8. Low Productivity
A service provider may not always be familiar with your tech stack and may not always be able to handle your workload. So they spend a lot of time researching and self-training, and the progress on the task slows down significantly.
Plus, they may take far longer to carry out tasks if they aren't familiar with them. For example, they may take several days to do a task an expert can do in an hour.
9. Low Commitment
This point underlies every disadvantage of a professional service provider. That is, they don't share your vision. They are not part of your company. They are not even an extension of your team. They may be skillful and knowledgeable in many areas but cannot give you the commitment, focus and dedication of an employee who believes in your vision.
The bottom line
Whether it's an employee or an outsource service provider, you and your team deserve a talented team player. To execute your development plan successfully, your team must have a responsive, committed, and knowledgeable DevOps Engineer. Like a basketball team needs a forward, and a football team needs a centre forward, your DevOps needs the best possible engineer to work efficiently. But, if you decide to hire a full-time DevOps employee, it will take you several months to recruit, and you will face high salary expectations. Once you finally get one, you'll end up creating a single point of failure. If you decide on outsourcing DevOps, you might end up with someone who is not responsive, productive, or aligned with your goals and concerns.
So, what is the solution?
The solution: Your Dedicated IAMOPS DevOps Teams
We founded IAMOPS to create an alternative for CTOs who face challenges while looking to get DevOps onboard.
Our primary motivation is to provide an alternative that will be superior to hiring a full-time employee or outsourcing DevOps services.
We highlighted four required objectives to become the superior alternative in the market:
1. Immediate Onboarding
2. Immediate Responses
3. Full DevOps Stack
4. Complete Resilience (no single point of failure)
Once you see this list, you can understand that a single professional can’t accomplish all the objectives. There must be a team. To enable immediate onboarding, we need to have a large volume of resources ready to start work on a new account as soon as possible. This means we need a large human resource pool that would enable this level of scaling. So we cannot limit ourselves to local talent – we must look at the global market and employ a distributed team framework.
How it works
IAMOPS DevOps teams have three members who act as an extension to our clients’ development team.
Once a start-ups’ CTO realize they need a DevOps in their team, they can book a kick-off meeting at www.iamops.io and start working immediately.
We enable this immediate onboarding by building and training DevOps teams on an ongoing basis, so there is always a DevOps team ready for work. That way, we reduce CTO’s recruitment time by 100%. So instead of several months wasted in the recruitment process, they can have a highly skilled DevOps Team….tomorrow!
Once they get an IAMOPS’ DevOps team onboard, they enjoy the resilience, accumulated knowledge and responsiveness of a three members TEAM, consisting of:
1. Main DevOps: The main responsive point of contact
2. Solution Architect: The experienced, knowledgeable professional
3. Support DevOps: Eliminates the single point of failure
The combination of 3 DevOps on a single team enables us to triple the DevOps tech stack.
The responsibility among the team members is as follows:
The main DevOps is always there to respond to queries or problems. In addition, they are the “hands-on” DevOps of the team. In case the main DevOps is sick or on leave, the Support DevOps will be available. This way, your DevOps will never be interrupted, and you can eliminate the risk of a single point of failure.
The solution architect is responsible for ensuring the implementation of the right tech stack and the best infrastructure possible to manage the product. They also brainstorm with the CTO and development team to keep the code and infrastructure aligned.
While immediate responsiveness is a given attribute of our IAMOPS DevOps teams, we realize that not all start-ups require the total workload of a DevOps team. This is why we enable early-stage start-ups (pre-seed, seed, Round A) to give their exact workload scope based on their maturity and needs – so you can have a fully responsive DevOps team, even if their actual required workload is only a few hours a day.
Our vision IAMOPS is to blend the of a professional service with the commitment and reliability of a full-time employee to create a new superior alternative. You can focus entirely on growth – we will provide CTOs and VP R&Ds with the best DevOps teams on the market.