The state of the global economy is far from stable at the moment. So, businesses are constantly looking for new ways to make their processes more efficient and less expensive. One of the most viable choices to achieve cost-efficiency is to engage a Cloud DevOps engineer, as DevOps can help you automate software development, optimize delivery costs, and speed up your digital transformation.
However, as a vendor delivering DevOps services for many years (30+ completed projects), we get how challenging it might be to find professionals who can understand and meet your specific needs.
We asked our seasoned DevOps specialists the questions to help you find exactly what you are looking for in Cloud DevOps. How to benefit from it? What are the signs that you need DevOps expertise? At what stages of your project do you need DevOps professionals?
What are the answers? Let’s discover together.
What is Cloud DevOps?
Cloud DevOps is the work approach that allows you to build, test, and deploy new updates and offerings more quickly. Your Cloud DevOps engineer either helps you set up the processes (e.g., build a CI/CD pipeline) or assesses your current processes, offers ways to improve them, and helps you implement all the necessary changes.
DevOps services typically cover the following:
- Cloud services (adoption, migration, and infrastructure);
- Delivery Pipeline and Continuous Integration;
- Security audit and infrastructure;
- Optimization and automation of the processes, etc.
Benefits of Cloud DevOps that will change your operations
A Cloud DevOps engineer sees the Cloud as a resource and a set of elements for making certain architectural decisions. Such professionals can help you make an infrastructural decision that will not limit your solution in the future and provide your business with flexibility crucial in the world of ever-changing requirements.
So, what exactly can you achieve with Cloud DevOps expertise by your side?
- Improved scalability. An environment requiring constant observation and support is the main area a Cloud DevOps engineer can help you with;
- Cost audit. A DevOps Cloud engineer can choose the services best fit for your business and thus optimize the costs for Cloud-based solutions;
- Support. There are better practices than using developers for on-call support of an application as you respond to the issues rather than predict and mitigate them. A DevOps for Cloud professionals, in turn, can automate the process and let developers focus on their jobs;
- Migration. When moving from an on-premise data center to the Cloud or in the case of Cloud-to-Cloud migration, DevOps can make up a significant part of the work that needs to be done.
On the contrary, many things may go south if your DevOps for Cloud engineers are not skilled enough.
What risks may you face partnering with inexperienced DevOps Cloud engineers?
1. Communication and management problems
You will not fully understand what is being done, why it is being done, and what benefits you are getting.
2. Low performance of your development team
Your team may lag behind and not understand how to work with the infrastructure if their Cloud DevOps engineer is underperforming. Let’s say the team has prepared the code for the release. Without proper DevOps expertise, they won’t be able to provide a landing zone or build pipelines quickly.
3. Poor resource management
A lack of DevOps expertise may lead to suboptimal use of resources that, in turn, often results in the high cost of the environment and its low flexibility. So, you are left with your solution as it is, with little ability to change it.
Your experts must understand patterns and approaches to building architecture. The same service can be hosted on a Cloud platform in different ways. Some solutions can make the infrastructure cheaper, but you will lose flexibility or other advantages, while others cost more but will be more efficient and stable.
What can you achieve with Cloud DevOps experts by your side?
1. Higher cost-efficiency
One of the main benefits of DevOps services is the effective allocation and use of your resources. Skilled DevOps engineers will help optimize resources and make your solution more cost-effective. There are four main ways to do that. Namely:
- CI/CD processes automation
Automating IT infrastructure provisioning and CI/CD processes with Infrastructure as a Code is a good idea. This will reduce the amount of required manual work and free up your engineers’ time.
- Cloud resources optimization
Your Cloud DevOps engineers will help you effectively manage the use of your Cloud resources and boost the development speed. For example, they can do that by enabling the automatic on-demand running of the infrastructure.
- Cloud costs reduction
This approach will allow you to combine and interchange different cost tiers of computing and storage resources and services based on current requirements as well as future capacity needs.
- Use of third-party services
With a trusted DevOps company by your side, you can take advantage of services offered by Cloud providers and easily combine them with custom tools to cover your needs optimally and efficiently.
2. Boost performance
If you partner with a vendor, your DevOps specialists can simplify system scalability and configuration across diverse development and production environments. This will allow you to quickly scale your infrastructure resources up or down, responding to traffic surges and fluctuations. Thus, the overall performance of your solution will become more efficient.
3. Enhance security
Although DevOps Cloud engineers do not deal with security directly, they still make a difference in this field. For instance, they grant access to your Cloud resources. Sometimes clients request to protect their services against DDoS attacks or other attacks. A DevOps for Cloud expert may perform all these tasks.
4. Keep your solution as effective as possible
An experienced DevOps company keeps tabs on innovations. If a new service is released that optimizes certain elements of your infrastructure and thus can make your solution more cost-effective, a reliable vendor will be the first to know.
Read more: DevOps outsourcing: How to get it right
What does your DevOps Cloud engineer do to boost your business?
Your DevOps for Cloud specialists carefully audit what solutions you already have in place. If you have an idea of a solution you need, it’s also fine – the team of reliable vendors will create the most cost-efficient development roadmap.
However, typically the process comprises the following stages:
1. Audit of your existing infrastructure
The audit is a critical task for your Cloud DevOps engineer, as you need to understand the potential optimization outcomes. During this stage, your team needs to find solid reasons why optimization is required, what consequences it may bring, and how your optimized infrastructure may perform in the long run.
You need to understand what resources you have and what is actually used. To thoroughly audit your current infrastructure, you need a strong team of DevOps Cloud engineers.
When the analysis is ready, it is time for the planning stage. During this period, your team decides what way of optimization is the best fit for your business.
2. Planning how to optimize your solution
There are different ways of Cloud DevOps optimization, and it is vital to find the most effective for your business case. So, the planning stage gets very important. For instance, creating Kubernetes clusters/Docker containers is a viable option to optimize Cloud infrastructure. This approach helps to reduce the hosting cost.
Learn more about IT infrastructure optimization
You need to understand which approach will bring the most benefits to your project and think carefully about how it should be implemented. If it becomes clear that something needs to be upgraded or rewritten, then the development team should join the process.
When a team has a clear understanding and vision of how the optimization process will look, they continue to the implementation stage.
3. Implementation of the planned roadmap
This stage depends on your specific business case. Let’s take DevOps for Cloud optimization by migrating to the Cloud. There are five main ways to do that. They are:
- Re-hosting. It is the easiest as it requires no coding effort and takes the least time. However, from a long-term perspective, this method doesn’t offer superior scalability and performance opportunities.
- Replatforming. This approach involves further adjustments to improve your landscape, like migration to fully managed services.
- Modernizing. When using this approach, your Cloud DevOps engineers enhance or change some application components before or after the migration. Thus, the more coding effort is needed. Rewriting is a complex process of application transformation that involves monolith to microservices decomposition.
- Drop and shop. Such a way is the best option if Cloud migration does not fit your budget. In this case, it is better to purchase the ready-made solutions that will bring you the scalability and performance opportunities you require.
- Retaining. It is a passive method, as no migration is needed. You keep applications as-is, where they are.
How to know that you should partner with DevOps Cloud engineers?
First of all, in case you deal with a Cloud platform hiring DevOps experts is a rule of thumb. Though DevOps practices may go unnoticeable during the development lifecycle, you will surely notice their results in the long run. For instance, if:
- the cost of your infrastructure seems unreasonably high;
- the overall performance of your solution is low;
- you use too many Cloud resources, etc.
These all are the signs you need a DevOps Cloud engineer that will conduct an infrastructure audit. Remember, every time you do an audit, there should be something to improve. Also, keep in mind that if you do not perform an audit on time, you risk introducing significant infrastructure changes in the future.
How to hire DevOps Cloud engineers from a trusted vendor?
A reliable company that provides Cloud DevOps services should have a proven track record of successfully delivered projects and diverse expertise with Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), technologies, and tools.
N-iX provides a wide range of DevOps-related services, including on-premise to Cloud migration, Cloud-to-Cloud migration, infrastructure setup, and more. We partner with North American and European clients in fintech, telecom, retail, healthcare, etc.
Businesses that benefit from cooperation with Cloud DevOps professionals
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Telit
Telit is a pioneer and leading manufacturer of global IoT, offering products for companies that rely on connectivity and enterprise-grade performance. The company’s secure modules, IoT connectivity plans, software, and platforms enable end-to-end IoT deployments.
They have chosen N-iX as their Cloud DevOps services provider, as they needed to modify their existing solution: make it Cloud-agnostic and modernize the technology stack. Also, the client intended to enable their customers to install the IoT portal in their environment.
The client involved one Solution Architect and two DevOps engineers from the N-iX side. Together with us, Telit has managed to:
- Increase customer outreach by making the solution Cloud-agnostic and enabling the customers to install the portal in their environment;
- Ensure better workload management and more optimal resource usage by implementing integrations with Prometheus, Grafana, and Graphite monitoring tools;
- Facilitate the installation of the IoT solution for customers by creating a step-by-step installation guide;
- Automate deployment and development processes by implementing the CI/CD pipeline.
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Orbus Software
Orbus Software is a leading software solution provider that enhances application portfolio management, business process analysis, and enterprise architecture capabilities. The company had to rely heavily on an extensive manual QC team which slowed down its development processes.
N-iX provided experienced DevOps specialists who helped to migrate the client’s legacy on-premise infrastructure to Infrastructure as Code and implemented automated CI/CD processes into the delivery pipeline. This significantly increased the speed and reliability of development and helped Orbus optimize costs by decreasing its need for manual QC.
Why implement DevOps for Cloud with N-iX?
- With 21 years in the software development market, N-iX has long-standing expertise in various domains, including logistics and supply chain, manufacturing, fintech, healthcare, retail, agritech, telecom, and more;
- N-iX has 45+ DevOps Cloud engineers on board who successfully delivered over 50 DevOps implementation projects;
- N-iX has strong presence on the US market partnering with numerous US industry leaders such as Gogo, Fluke Corporation, Office Depot, Seeking Alpha, TuneIn and many others;
- The vendor is compliant with PCI DSS, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and GDPR data protection standards;
- We are a certified AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and Google Cloud Platform Partner.
