DevOps engineers help businesses accelerate development processes, optimize infrastructure costs and performance, as well as create efficient delivery pipelines.
As the demand for DevOps experts grows, many businesses find it challenging to find and hire DevOps engineers with the right expertise. Where should you look for DevOps specialists? And how to make sure that they have the expertise and experience you are looking for? Let's find the answers in our DevOps engineering hiring guide.
Where to find DevOps engineers?
Europe is an attractive outsourcing destination with a large pool of experienced DevOps professionals. English proficiency and high-quality education make DevOps experts from these countries worthy competitors in the labor market. Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and Bulgaria are IT outsourcing leaders across the CEE region. Poland is home to the largest pool of engineers who are qualified to successfully implement any DevOps transformation strategy. However, over 40% of local experts are involved in BPO projects, making them unavailable for outsourced tech partnerships. Ukraine offers the second-largest DevOps talent pool in the region (10K), and Ukrainian experts are ranked 5th in the world by TopCoder. Romania offers the third-largest pool of DevOps experts in the region. It has an emerging software outsourcing market, with many young companies eager to form new partnerships.
Latin America is another popular outsourcing destination for IT services, and DevOps engineering is no exception. Brazil is a leading country in this region, with over 49K DevOps engineers. Mexico and Colombia have more than 10K DevOps engineers each and are right behind Brazil. The minimal time difference between tech hubs in Latin America and the US offers a strategic advantage for companies seeking outsourcing opportunities. Also, the LATAM region offers a vast talent pool with solid education and expertise. Tech professionals here have English proficiency to communicate with international clients. However, the most attractive advantage of outsourcing to LATAM is cost efficiency, as the average salary of a DevOps engineer can be half as much as in the US.
Asia is the last region in our DevOps engineering hiring guide, and it is witnessing remarkable growth due to rapid digital technology adoption and rising IT investments by emerging economies. This region experiences a surge in software development activities, driving the demand for DevOps practices. India is the DevOps outsourcing leader in Asia.
Read more: DevOps outsourcing: How to get it right
What are DevOps engineer hiring models?
When partnering with DevOps experts, there are multiple routes you can explore. Let's delve into each hiring option in more detail to find the best for you:
- In-house hiring of DevOps engineers is an approach that fits long-term projects. Full-time experts are committed to the company, more dedicated to its infrastructure, and give quicker responses to new challenges. However, in-house hiring is more expensive than other options because of the fixed costs associated with full-time employees. In addition, in-house teams may face scalability limitations, potentially slowing down adjustments to team size according to project demands. Besides, it can take a long time to find the right DevOps experts.
- Freelance platforms are one of the fast and flexible approaches to hiring DevOps experts. Freelancers provide expertise for specific projects or periods, enabling companies to access specialized skills without requiring a long-term commitment. However, this option is unsuitable for long-term projects as freelance engineers are likely to frequently switch jobs.
- Hiring outsourced or outstaffed DevOps engineers from vendor companies is a more strategic approach for businesses to optimize costs and efficiency. Partnering with a reliable outsourcing company combines the advantages of freelancers and full-time employees. This method allows for long-term collaboration with a team that is thoroughly familiar with your project.
How to hire DevOps engineers: top 4 best practices
DevOps transformation is a complicated process, and its success relies heavily on the tech partner that you choose. In addition to settling on the right location, there are other things that you need to keep in mind while choosing a tech partner that will provide you with DevOps engineers. We collected best practices in our DevOps engineering hiring guide to help you select the most suitable vendor.
1. Identify your needs and set KPIs that you aim to achieve
Before any project, it is essential to define areas you aim to improve and the KPIs you expect to achieve. When it comes to DevOps, these can be:
- Improving scalability. One of the most significant advantages DevOps engineers bring is their ability to quickly and efficiently scale your delivery infrastructure up or down.
- Optimizing costs. DevOps specialists can help distribute your expenses more efficiently by automating delivery infrastructure, leveraging third-party services, and optimizing the use and costs of infrastructure resources.
- Enabling 24/7 support. DevOps can automate on-call solution assistance to enable 24/7 support and free up your engineers' time.
- Migrating the infrastructure. DevOps facilitates seamless infrastructure migration by integrating development and operations teams, automating processes, and fostering collaboration to ensure efficient deployment and resource management.
- Utilizing Big Data. DevOps engineers can help you optimize your data infrastructure for more efficient data collection, storage, and analysis.
2. Explore your partner's portfolio
While evaluating a service provider for a potential partnership, pay special attention to their portfolios. They can be found on the companies' websites or platforms that provide verified reviews, such as Clutch or GoodFirms. A large number of highly rated projects is the first criterion that signifies a reliable partner.
3. Learn about the DevOps services your partner provides
It is crucial to choose a partner that offers a wide range of DevOps services as you may require them during your transformation journey, even if you have no need for them now. These should include:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC);
- Site reliability engineering;
- Delivery pipeline as well as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD);
- Infrastructure automation, orchestration, stability;
- Infrastructure security;
- DDos, web attack, and intrusion detection and prevention;
- Incident management;
- Firewall as a Service and hardware firewall;
- Configuration management;
- Monitoring, logging, and alerting.
4. Assess the expertise of DevOps experts
The next stop in our DevOps engineering hiring guide is expertise. In addition to services, your partner must provide you with skilled DevOps engineers who are proficient in the tools and technologies you need. While these may vary depending on the specifics of your project, the following areas must be covered:
- Public and private clouds: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, Helm, PowerShell, Terraform.
- Automation and orchestration: Ansible, Bash, Chef, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, PowerShell, Puppet.
- CI/CD: AWS, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, AWS CodeDeploy/CodePipeline, Jenkins Pipeline, TeamCity.
- Monitoring and logging: AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, Elasticsearch, Grafana, Kibana, Nagios, Prometheus, Splunk, Zabbix.
- Infrastructure security: AWS SG, AWS WAF, Azure Firewall and Application Gateway, Azure NSG, Cisco ASA, OSSEC, Snort, Suricata.
3 success stories where businesses profited from the expertise of DevOps engineers
N-iX provided their expertise to help many clients successfully deliver projects of varying complexity. Let's wrap up this DevOps engineering hiring guide with several success stories to show how our experts can help businesses achieve their goals.
DevOps as part of a large-scale digital transformation for Lebara
N-iX helped Lebara, one of Europe's largest and fastest-growing telecom companies, undergo a large-scale digital transformation. Naturally, DevOps played an essential part in the digitization process, which was made more difficult by the fact that it had to be completed on a live product.
Our DevOps experts conducted a thorough audit of Lebara's infrastructure and provided a detailed transformation plan. They introduced various automation tools and DevOps practices into the delivery pipeline, significantly boosting the speed of developing bug-free code and reducing the amount of required manual work to a minimum. As a result, Lebara now enjoys a much faster time to market for its new products.
DevOps Center of Excellence for a large wireless telecom service provider
N-iX set up a DevOps Center of Excellence for their client (under NDA)—a company that provides technology and business services for multinational wireless telecom enterprises.
Our experts conducted an on-site assessment of the existing DevOps processes. They optimized and standardized the CI/CD operations across the entire organization and streamlined the configuration and OS patching of the client's solutions.
DevOps engineers supported the client's digital transformation, helped enhance their high-load system that processes thousands of messages every second, and significantly increased their product's scalability.
Infrastructure migration and automated CI/CD pipeline for Orbus
The last success story in our DevOps engineering hiring guide is N-iX's partnership with Orbus. Orbus 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 their development processes.
N-iX provided the client with 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.
How N-iX DevOps developers can help your business?
- N-iX has a strong team of 60 DevOps specialists who are experts at CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, cloud adoption, and other DevOps tools and techniques;
- We have significant experience in providing various tech services for leading global enterprises, having formed strategic partnerships with big names such as Lebara, Fluke Corporation, and Office Depot;
- N-iX ensures that your data is always protected by complying with all information security regulations, such as GDPR, ISO 27001:2013, SOC2, PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and more.
- N-iX has garnered recognition from various industry awards, including the CRN Solution Provider 500, Global Outsourcing 100 by IAOP, ISG Provider Lens™, and acknowledgment as a Modern Application Development services provider by Forrester, among others.
