by Jacob Beasley
More and more companies are recognizing the benefits of DevOps, the set of practices that combine software development and operations together to increase teams’ efficiency delivering production-ready solutions. There are a number of practices and standards that constitute DevOps. Let’s start by exploring a few of these fundamental practices, and then we’ll dive into what Fractional DevOps is, what its benefits are, and how it could benefit you and your team.
DevOps includes practices such as:
- Automated Builds: Compiling your code to validate it builds properly and the same way every time, reducing the risk of things only working on one of the developer’s machines.
- Automated Testing: Running tests to validate code regressions did not take place as well as deployments were successful.
- Automated Deployments: Deploying code in the same way every time, reducing errors and letting your team focus on building things, not spending hours deploying things (or making mistakes and breaking things).
- Automated Configuration: Configuration and change management so that you can track changes, roll back changes, and roll them out in a consistent, repeatable way.
- Resiliency: Automated Backups, Monitoring, Redundancy/High Availability, Failovers, and Restoration of Services mean higher availability and less 3am alerts!
Jacob Beasley, Director of DevOps
Jacob leads the development and deployment of transformative software solutions at Centroid. Previously the Co-Founder of Intelletive Consulting, now part of Centroid, he specializes in using cutting-edge technologies like Kubernetes, Docker, Istio, and Terraform. His expertise across tech stacks from NodeJS to Java ensures robust and scalable software solutions.
What is Fractional DevOps?
If you want the benefit of a dedicated team of DevOps / Site Reliability Engineers but do not have the budget to hire a team of full-time site reliability engineers, then Fractional DevOps is a good fit for you. Hiring a Fractional DevOps Team means that you are hiring a DevOps Consulting Company to support your team or enterprise.
With Fractional DevOps, instead of having full-time dedicated engineers, you would have a fractional team of expert consultants familiar with your project and capable of supporting your business on an ongoing basis. This ensures business continuity while gaining the benefit of a diverse team of site reliability engineers.
Why Fractional DevOps?
While DevOps has many benefits, it also offers unique challenges.
Unlike software development, you really want to be able to support your operations 24×7, not just 9:00am to 5:00pm. Also, replacing DevOps team members can be harder than replacing software developers or analysts, so fractional DevOps can ensure business continuity even if somebody leaves, but without the costs of hiring a team of full-time DevOps Engineers. Also, DevOps requires specialized skills that many software developers do not have. While they can learn or cross-train to do some after-hours support, the skills are unique enough that you will want a secondary-level of support with a deeper knowledge base.
Business Continuity
Unless you are a bootstrapping startup, you probably want to make sure your company can continue to operate even if a team member leaves. With tools like Kubernetes, CICD Pipelines, and other Platform-as-a-Service offerings, the skills can be narrow enough that it can be difficult to hire and replace DevOps team members. Nonetheless, these tools offer very high levels of value.
In this case, contracting for Fractional DevOps resources can ensure that you can see the benefits of DevOps while also ensuring business continuity if somebody leaves.
Specialization
Many DevOps skills are specialized and building a team with a breadth of experiences in these different skills can require staffing multiple resources with varying skills and experiences. Doing so is expensive, and if a single person leaves, you may find them difficult to replace. Our team of engineers have many skills and, unlike hiring 1-2 individuals, you are protected from losing all your knowledge when one person walks out the door.
Our team of expert DevOps consultants consists of:
- Certified Kubernetes Administrators
- Principal-Level Software Architecting
- Certified Cloud Architects
- Security / Penetration Testing Experience
- Deployment Pipelines
- Automated Testing and Performance Testing
- Database Administration and Performance Tuning
- Experience Implementing Compliant Software
Affordability
If you do not need 3 full-time DevOps employees, then why pay for 3 full-time DevOps employees? With Fractional DevOps, your team gains the experience, knowledge, and expertise of full-time DevOps engineers for a fraction of the cost of full-time DevOps employees. Pay for what you need, but still gain the benefits of a team of talented DevOps team members.
24×7 Coverage
With a team of DevOps engineers at your disposal, you can ensure a 24×7 on-call schedule to support your software systems without the cost of a whole team of full-time engineers.
Are you looking for DevOps support?
If so, reach out to our team! We deliver a full range of DevOps services and solutions that help propel transformative change for our customers. Our range of capabilities includes:
- Software Development
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Build and Support Services
- Secure Software and Systems
- Respond and Support Services
- Compliance and Security Capabilities
If there’s software that needs to be built, secured, or improved, our team can help. Feel free to reach out to us at connectwithu[email protected] or by filling out our brief Contact Us inquiry form if you’re interested in learning more about our DevOps services. We’re confident we can help you build reliable, secure, and powerful software that can truly move the needle for your organization and your customers.