DevOps has revolutionized software delivery and IT operations. However, not all organizations have the skills or resources in-house to adopt DevOps methodologies effectively. This is where DevOps managed services providers can help.
What are DevOps Managed Services?
DevOps managed services provide ongoing management, support, and expertise to implement DevOps practices for clients. A provider takes care of setting up and integrating tools, defining processes, training staff, and handling day-to-day operations. This allows organizations to gain the benefits of DevOps without needing to develop extensive in-house skills.
Key Activities Handled by Providers
Typical activities handled by DevOps managed service providers include:
- Consultation to create a DevOps strategy and roadmap
- Selection and setup of DevOps tools like Git, Jenkins, Docker etc
- Building deployment pipelines
- Configuring infrastructure as code
- Integrating security practices
- Setting up monitoring and observability
- Defining processes and documentation
- Providing training and coaching to teams
- Maintaining and upgrading tools and systems
- Ongoing operational management of DevOps workflows
Reasons Organizations Adopt Managed DevOps Services
There are several key drivers that lead companies to embrace DevOps managed services rather than attempt to build in-house DevOps capabilities from scratch:
1. Gain Skills and Expertise Quickly
DevOps requires new skills, tools and processes that traditional IT departments often lack. Getting upskilled across development, QA, ops and security is challenging.
Managed services allow leveraging outside specialists so teams can rapidly adopt DevOps, without needing to first spend months or years training.
2. Avoid Cost and Effort of Own Implementation
Implementing DevOps practices requires rearchitecting systems and DevOps support services, integrating disparate tools, and changing processes. For resource-constrained IT teams, this work can be daunting.
Outsourcers handle the heavy lifting of setting up pipelines, configuring monitoring, establishing security controls etc. This saves clients substantial cost and effort compared to their implementations.
3. Reduce Risk of Failed Initiatives
Industry surveys suggest over 75% of DevOps initiatives fail to meet objectives fully. Reasons include incorrect toolchain integration, poor process definition and lack of buy-in.
Leveraging expert providers reduces the risk of a failed adoption. Their standardized blueprints and best practices greatly improve the chances of successful DevOps rollouts.
4. Scale Flexibly as Needs Change
In-house resourcing often leads to fixed capacity that is unable to flex with changes in application volume or process needs.
Outsourced services offer flexible scaling of skilled people, tools and infrastructure. Capabilities can expand and contract rapidly based on workload.
5. Free Internal Teams to Focus on Innovation
For many IT teams, just keeping existing systems running takes up all available cycles. Little time is left to create improvements or build new capabilities.
By offloading management of DevOps platforms to a provider, internal developers, testers and ops engineers get freed up to focus on more strategic efforts.
Key Considerations for Choosing a DevOps Services Partner
With growing demand for managed DevOps services, many providers now exist. Key selection criteria include:
1. Experience Across Full DevOps Lifecycle
Look for demonstrated expertise across the plan-create-verify-deploy-operate steps of DevOps. As an emerging discipline, few firms have extensive experience, so review projects carefully.
2. Skill Across Key Roles
DevOps brings together development, QA, operations and security. Ensure your provider has strong skillsets across these domains to avoid lopsided or siloed capabilities.
3. Ability to Integrate and Manage Multi-Vendor Tools
Most enterprises use technologies from many different vendors. Your outsourcer should integrate diverse tools into a unified pipeline without vendor lock-in forcing adoption of specific platforms.
4. Technology and Vendor Neutrality
Beware providers who resell a narrow set of vendor solutions since they will shoehorn those into engagements when alternatives may be better suited. Seek advisory-led, tool-agnostic partners.
5. Flexible Delivery and Commercial Models
Every organization has unique needs, so partners should tailor offerings across various delivery models like staff augmentation, project-based, managed services etc. Contracts and pricing should align with your operating model.
Key Components of a DevOps Managed Service
Mature managed service offerings share several common components:
1. Design Services
By providing discovery and analysis services, the provider helps define future DevOps frameworks that are in tune with business targets.
Setting a vision and strategy for a successful DevOps implementation relies heavily on the design phase. In-depth measurements of available tools and team abilities help discover the disparities between existing and intended outcomes. To guide the initiative, the architects will design a cohesive plan that covers architecture changes, integration plans, roll-out schedules, budget requirements and many technological and human factors.
Creating an effective design plan keeps unstructured tool implementations in check and encourages targeted movement toward business objectives. This enables the managed services partner and enterprise team to communicate goals and establish governance principles that everyone agrees on.
2. Build Services
Picking tools and merging them with pipeline creation configuration management scripts security frameworks testing strategies and deploys through automation.
The build phase puts DevOps designs into practice via hands-on toolchain implementation and process definition. With the blueprint as guidance, managed service engineers now begin assembling the integrated toolchains, cloud architectures, and automation scripts that will constitute the DevOps platform.
Care is taken to create self-service workflows allowing developers, testers and tech teams to access pipeline capabilities with minimal friction. Security and compliance requirements are woven throughout via policy-as-code, credential management, secrets handling etc. By offloading the heavy lifting of tool integration and scripting to the managed provider, clients avoid an often painful learning curve.
3. Operate Services
Ongoing management of infrastructure, code, pipelines, applications etc, under DevOps, including enhancement, maintenance, and support services.
Once DevOps platforms are up and running, skilled staff keep things humming via 7×24 monitoring, healing, enhancement and support duties. Having specialized operations talent from the provider augments the client’s staff and allows them to focus on product feature delivery rather than platform plumbing. Support ranges from fixing pipeline failures to tuning infrastructure to updating plugins.
Regular platform reviews also allow for continuous improvement by identifying bottlenecks in process or technology limiting productivity or quality gains. This prevents the all-too-common drift into infrastructure decay as technical debt accumulates.
4. Optimize Services
Ongoing review of processes and the process of enhancement to boost outcomes.
To uncover optimization potential, partners in managed services should regularly examine telemetry information regarding usage. With the development of application workloads resources alter and increase to ensure performance guarantees. Through collaboration with enterprise teams the partner develops implementation plans for emerging innovations including AI testing and policy-driven security practices for fortified DevOps solutions.
5. Transfer Services
Knowledge transfer and training support a consistent move of authority to internal teams.
To foster independence and lessen reliance on external support workers, mature managed services implement effective change management and learning initiatives. To assist client teams in mastering platform management systematically over time, training and diagrams are shared. This provides stability of operations after contracts conclude by improving the in-house team’s proficiency in DevOps.
DevOps Outcomes Achieved via Managed Services
Typical outcomes realized by clients leveraging managed DevOps services encompass:
1. Improved Time-to-Market for Software Releases
DevOps automation and streamlined workflows significantly accelerate application release cycles. Code gets production-ready faster.
2. Higher Release Quality
Continuous testing and monitoring results in fewer defects and production incidents. Systems sustain higher quality over time.
3. Increased Deployment Frequency
Smooth orchestration and automation facilitates more frequent code deployments with lower overhead. Faster user feedback and fixes.
4. Enhanced Security
Baked-in security analysis, controls and monitoring across pipelines prevent defects and protect data.
5. Greater Scalability
On-demand provisioning of infrastructure and configuration management support seamless scaling.
6. Higher Availability and Reliability
Proactive monitoring, automated healing, and infrastructure management drive up app availability.
7. Improved Productivity and Morale
By automating manual tasks and providing self-service access, staff efficiency improves. Less burnout and attrition results.
Evaluating Providers
Choosing the right DevOps managed services partner is critical. Key aspects to evaluate include:
- Skills: The technical capabilities across development, operations, QA, security and cloud domains. Certifications held etc.
- Tools Experience: Expertise with leading CI/CD, infrastructure as code and monitoring tools like Jenkins, Terraform, Datadog etc.
- Methodology: DevOps practices followed and how standardized they are across projects.
- Industry Knowledge: Domain experience in your specific industry to tailor solutions.
- Cloud Platform Support: Ability to support on-premise, hybrid cloud and multiple public cloud platforms.
- Security: Processes and certifications are held to secure code, infrastructure, pipelines, etc.
- Compliance: Adherence to regulations like HIPAA, PCI, GDPR etc per your environment.
- Reliability: Sustained track record of performance and availability of managed platforms.
- References: Speaking to past clients to understand their experience.
- Pricing Model: Flexibility around price structure and alignment to services adopted.
- Contract Terms: Typical length, termination policies and IP ownership clauses.
Key Takeaways
Here are the critical things to remember about managed DevOps services:
- They provide skilled staff, tools and services needed to implement DevOps practices on an ongoing basis.
- Leading drivers for adoption are gaining expertise quickly, reducing costs and risks, adding flexibility and freeing up team bandwidth.
- Providers should have cross-domain skills, tool expertise and delivery model flexibility.
- While risks like loss of control exist, they can be mitigated via governance, transparency and change management.
- Criteria for provider evaluation spans technical capabilities, cloud experience, security reliability and more.
- Scenarios where turning to managed services makes sense include first-time adoption, workload spikes, and enabling transformations.
The bottom line is that DevOps managed services offer a fast track for enterprises to realize the benefits of DevOps without getting bogged down attempting to build all capabilities in-house. They provide the talent and specialization to turn DevOps goals into reality.