DevOps is a software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops). The main characteristic of the DevOps movement is to strongly advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction, from integration, testing, releasing to deployment and infrastructure management. DevOps aims at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, more dependable releases, in close alignment with business objectives.
When we started PolarSeven in 2013 customers were looking to migrate their environments to the cloud. In 2019, the cloud journey has accelerated. We have found that customers who are building applications and deploying to their customers have unique challenges. Product teams are deploying features faster and more regularly to end users. Greenfields projects are serverless or use containers.
To achieve security and deployment in a uniform and repeatable way automation is required to make this happen. Application deployment workflows are complex to set up and once setup require constant nurturing and evolution to ensure running smoothly. For the same reason that you service your car you need to nurture and service your deployment workflows. This ensures that they continue to support your staff and ensure continued business growth.
We have also found that developers need to be more focussed on building applications rather than distracted by their infrastructure their applications run on. Puppet 2017 State of DevOps Report stated that product teams delivered 44% more features when they were dedicated to building software rather than splitting their time between software and operations. Application deployment workflows require constant nurturing but do not normally require a dedicated person.
So then what are your options.
Hire a dedicated Fulltime Employee at the current salary of $120k + in Sydney
Ask your client focused application developers to split their time
Engage a dedicated organisation of skilled and certified professionals at significantly less than the cost of an FTE
Once you have enough work for a full time devops employee you should absolutely take that option as long as you have the culture to make them stay. Good devops engineers cost more than software developers and it is very hard to keep a devops engineer engaged for a long period of time before they are headhunted away. All of the engineers at PolarSeven focus on AWS and we struggle to keep up with the stream of products released by AWS. There is no way a software engineer can be up to speed with software development and up to speed with the latest releases at AWS.
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