For a successful DevOps adoption, business and enterprises pose a dilemma- should you have an in-house DevOps service, or should you choose DevOps as a Service?

 Although there were thousands of explanations on DevOps and its uses, it has been more than 10+ years since DevOps methodology has shaken the digital world, winning the attention of IT executives globally. 

 According to an Atlassian survey, 99% of IT professionals believed that DevOps positively impacted their organization. It improved the quality of products & services, the time to market them, and the team's performance.

However, the dichotomy is growing even more expansive now that many web development companies are building end-to-end DevOps as Service environments that enable enterprises with quick and repeated tasks for continuous application support.

As these environments become more complex, obtaining a DevOps certification, such as the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or Microsoft Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, can be invaluable for professionals looking to demonstrate their expertise in managing and optimizing these advanced workflows.

If you are still deliberating about which DevOps service option is good for you, this article will help you. 

What Are DevOps As A Service And Why Does It Matter?

The acronym DevOps stands for Development & Operations, and DevOps as a Service is a tool that facilitates collaboration between software development and operations teams within an organization. 

The primary purpose of DevOps as a Service is to ensure that the organizations follow strategies like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and successfully achieve the desired outcomes to deliver business value. 

Apart from breaking down communication barriers and collaboration between development and IT operations teams, the primary function of DevOps is customer satisfaction and faster delivery. Businesses can propel innovation and continuous process improvement by adopting DevOps services.

The practice of DevOps encourages faster, better, more secure delivery of business value to the end customers. It may take the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates or how quickly an issue or bug is identified, resolved, and re-released.

Challenges Faced By Business In Traditional SDLC

Despite the simplicity of the Software Delivery Life Cycle (SDLC) model, it has several defects. It has been observed that in the ever-changing digital world, a business is met with multifaceted problems which require quick fixes. Changes in product development as adding new features, fixing bugs, etc., require it to go through at least 4-5 silos in traditional SDLC, causing delays and increasing costs. 

Here are a few challenges that traditional SDLC face.

• Lack Of Communication And Time-consuming Approach

The traditional SDLC method separates the software developers, test engineers, and maintenance teams into three groups where they perform the operations one after the other. The developers can't cooperate with the test engineers or operation teams assigned to maintain the stability of the software. Thus the lack of communication, along with an isolated structure of departments, not only resulted in a time-consuming approach but also led to an uncoordinated and faulty approach.

• Insufficient Tests And More Chances Of Error

Traditional SDLC conducts tests individually in unit forms. For better & higher functionality and detection of flaws, individual testing isn't enough to create a standard quality output. The process makes the test engineers fail to continue testing due to fixed silos of departments. Thus with these loopholes, the development team ends up with issues like post-release bugs and delays in marketing the product.

• Late Feedback And Lack Of Transparency

Due to fixed isolated work stages, the final result has significant gaps, which leads to rework. Also, the lack of integration and collaboration makes the development team work overtime and fail to respond to the users' complaints in the stipulated time.

• Delay In Fixing Bugs And Updates

Without transparency between the software testing engineers and developers fixing a bug and making new changes may take weeks or even months. It will be difficult for businesses to market their product on time using traditional methods; if they repeatedly fail to deliver the project.

Benefits Of DevOps As A Service

Now the question arises, how can a business move ahead in the competitive market and become more efficient in delivering the best features to the end-users in the set time?

Well, the answer is- through DevOps as a Service.

Here are a few prime benefits a business can enjoy after adopting DevOps as a Service:

• Helps To Deliver Better Customers Value

The driving force of every business is delivering better customer value, and using DevOps as a Service enables your tech teams to align technology to your core business. Businesses that follow a robust DevOps Strategy can provide more value to their customers by removing automated and repetitive processes. 

Thus the DevOps team provides you with more time to spend focusing on innovating and enhancing technology quality, along with high-quality solutions to your customers faster.

• Helps To Reduce Cycle Time

A robust DevOps process encourages agility within the development and operations team. The development team can change the platform and roll out new features on the fly. As the DevOps service teams are constantly running through testing and deployment, it is easier to fix bugs and patch issues as they arise and can respond to customer needs quickly. Thus cycle time is drastically reduced because iteration is built into the process.

• Helps To Speed Up Time To Market

Similar to how DevOps reduces cycle time, it also speeds up the time to market your project/product because it allows teams to move faster. Using DevOps methodology, businesses can accelerate the development process and its ability to scale. It gives teams quick customer feedback on products, reducing response time to customer’s requests.

• Helps To Encourage Continuous Improvement

The key factor of using DevOps is that it aligns the company's people and resources around the same goals. You can drive new efficiencies through increased visibility and communication when your development and operations teams work together. Development teams are centered around releases, updates, and deployment, so any problems that arise can be fixed faster using DevOps.

• Helps To Promote Agility And Transparency

It’s no secret that making your business agile can help you to stay ahead in the market. Thanks to DevOps managed service providers who can make it possible for your business to scale and enable you to focus on your core activities.

DevOps is all about using the process for accessible communication, elimination of silos, and promotion of collaboration, making them focused on their specialized field. Incorporating DevOps-as-a-service has led to an upsurge in productivity and efficiency among the employees of a company.

In-house DevOps vs DevOps As A Service- Which One To Choose?

According to Glassdoor, DevOps Engineer' is ranked 5th of the ten best jobs in the US with a minimum salary of $110,003. This means you're paying out each month more than $9,000 (AVG) to a DevOps specialist plus overheads and taxes- 40% more than the average US salary of a professional in the US.

Whereas DevOps as a Service team has top professionals, enabling you to quickly deploy your products and focus on streamlining and simplifying SDLC. As well as cutting costs, you save time and money on recruiting and onboarding new team members, thus reducing the risk of staff turnover.

For better clarity, let's find out the pros and cons of an in-house DevOps team and A Remote DevOps Team.

Cons of an in-house DevOps team

• More Expense: Having an in-house team is quite a luxury as you'll need to invest a lot of money in supporting them, such as- buying computers and tables, renting an office, and paying salary on an ongoing basis, even after the project ends!

• Time: Hiring in-house DevOps experts is time-consuming. You'll need to offer a higher salary, career growth, and an exciting project to make him a part of your company. While you look for the right talent, your project is on hold.

• Limited Skill: When you employ in-house DevOps, you pay the extra cost of updating them. You must train the team or let your competitors get ahead if new tech comes up.
  
  

Pros Of An In-house DevOps Team

• Control: You have total control of the team's processes in exchange for the higher cost. Also, you can start your work immediately after the recruitment process.

• Fits Your Corporate Culture: One of the most significant alarming issues in hiring a remote DevOps team is that they may need to understand your company culture. In-house DevOps teams know what the company wants to deliver and how they like best to do it.

• Face-to-face Communication: The Best way to express your ideas is to talk face-to-face. Working with an in-house DevOps team mitigates the chances of misunderstanding and reaching your goal.

Pros Of A Remote DevOps Team

Affordable Talents: The glassdoor survey confirms the average salary of a DevOps engineer is $110,003 whereas in the UK is £48,518, in Canada C$82,231, and in India is $20,084. Whereas when you hire remote engineers, you can look for affordable talents across the globe for your product development.

• Cost Reduction: Unlike an in-house DevOps team, a remote DevOps team will save you a lot of money. You don’t need to worry about providing equipment or a workspace. The only fee to negotiate is the team’s hourly rate.

• Access To Big Talent Pool:  A remote DevOps service team that offers its services to different companies has a much more comprehensive range of experiences in different spheres of business. They will be more tech stack updated and may solve your problem faster than your in-house team.

• Focus On Your Business: Hiring a remote DevOps team can free up your time and enable you to focus on your core business. They can handle all DevOps-related activities to help you focus on other top-priority tasks.

• Scale Your Business: Hiring remote DevOps engineers, enables you to scale up and down your team as required. You may choose a single DevOps engineer or dedicated teams as per your project requirements.

Cons Of A Remote DevOps Team

• Quality: Although hiring a remote DevOps team is cost-saving, there may also be a chance of poor quality work from them. Therefore, in our next segment, we will discuss hiring a remote DevOps team for better final product performance and quality.

• Time Zone Gap: It is one of the significant reasons many businesses go for in-house DevOps teams. For example, if you are in the US and your remote team is in India, there is more than a 10 hours gap between both countries. Finalizing a mutual time zone to communicate with your dedicated team is essential.

• Security Issue: You may risk your business's personal information when hiring remote developers or a DevOps team, especially in countries with privacy issues. China, for example, has had a few notable cases.

Top Services That Are Offered By DevOps as a Service Company

When an enterprise is working hand-to-hand with a Remote DevOps team, the business’s expenses can considerably decrease by 50% and, as a consequence, help you to save costs.

Remote workplaces for DevOps exponentially increase worker productivity more efficiently, thus benefiting both employers and employees- lowering stress and distractions, and leading to higher work efficiency in the cloud world. 

Here are a few services that you may expect from DevOps as a Service Company.

• DevOps Process Setup:

The key objectives of DevOps process setup are speed, quality, and business agility. DevOps teams collect, analyze, and measure metrics that are aligned with the critical business goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

DevOps as a Service company thus facilitates organizations with a well-researched plan for DevOps transformation through setting out roadmaps for continuous integration and deployment. 

• DevOps Monitoring:

This practice involves ongoing monitoring of both the code in operation and the underlying infrastructure. It provides a feedback loop on bugs or issues and then makes its way back to development.

The remote DevOps team monitors the entire process from planning to development to integrating to testing in the software development life cycle.

• DevOps CI/CD Automation:

This practice brings together test and development tools to track how much of the code being developed is ready for production. It also automates the release of new or changed code into production. 

A remote DevOps team can help you chalk out a phased approach for CI/CD automation throughout the development, testing, integration, and deployment phases.

• DevOps Continuous Testing

It is a practice that incorporates automated, prescheduled, continued code tests when application code is being written or updated. This test can speed up the delivery of code to production.

With this approach, the remote team can also ensure that the product is tested thoroughly across each stage of the development process.

• DevOps Architecture:

It is mainly used for applications hosted on cloud platforms and large distributed applications. The DevOps team uses Agile development so that integration and delivery can be continuous.  They also help to run and manage your software on cloud through server management. 

• DevOps Version Control:

The feature in DevOps helps to record changes to files stored in the system. These files can be source code, assets, or other documents that might be part of a software development project. It  secures your organization's tech assets from any internal or external threats with the help of security management services.

• Engineering Modernization:

DevOps engineers use this feature in legacy systems and modern environments that helps to streamline the code-change lifecycle along with automated tools to manage development and deployment quickly.

Relationship Between Cloud Managed Services And DevOps As A Services

Companies today understand that if they want to increase their competitiveness in today’s swiftly changing world, they can’t ignore digital transformation and DevOps. Although the relationship between the two is often confusing, DevOps is about process and process improvement whereas cloud migration is about technology and services. 

Therefore,  it’s important to understand how cloud managed services and DevOps as a service work together to help businesses achieve their transformation goals. While the cloud itself has several definitions, the most basic definition is that it allows the provisioning of infrastructure.  Infrastructure monitoring is crucial for ensuring system reliability. It constantly tracks code and infrastructure, promptly detecting and reporting issues, fostering a seamless integration between development and operations. After - then makes its way back to development.

And the beauty of cloud services and why they become so easily intermingled in DevOps vocabulary is that they complement DevOps processes regardless of which way your organization defines them. 

In simple language, using DevOps as a service can help organizations develop applications that need frequent and rapid deployment whereas cloud managed service can provide the ideal environment for DevOps automation due to its central nature.

It is crucial for companies to adopt CloudOps- Cloud and DevOps together to craft and adhere to a strategy that leads to stability and consistency.

How To Choose A Good Remote DevOps Team?

Obviously, not all remote DevOps teams offer high-quality services. How do you choose a reliable one? Here are the points you should consider when looking to hire a remote DevOps team.

• Clients, recommendations, and brand image:

Look for their previous clients of the DevOps team, and see what feedback those clients give about the collaboration. Also, check their portfolio about the kind of work they have done in the past. See if they have worked on a similar project like yours before.

• DevOps Priorities:

It is essential to pay attention to what goals and rules the remote team follow, and if they put the interests of their clients first.

• Communication With The DevOps Team:

Clarify how your remote DevOps team will communicate with administrators, how promptly they will answer your messages, and how quickly your tasks will be solved. Check if they offer 24/7 emergency support.

• Cost Saving:

Saving cost is one the essential factors when it comes to hiring a remote DevOps team. Apart from cutting down costs, partnering with the best DevOps team can also scale up your business. Also, a remote DevOps team has a wide range of talents and experts that your in-house DevOps team may lack. 

Conclusion

In this article, we have tried reducing your dilemma of choosing an in-house DevOps team to DevOps as a service provider. Remote DevOps engineers not only simplify product development, and improve communication between individual project teams, but also save the company money. 

At Classic Informatics, we have enormous experience with DevOps and leverage DevOps best practices to ensure transparency, collaboration, and cross-functionality of your teams, and lead you to DevOps success.