DevOps approach is the cornerstone of modern software delivery and infrastructure management. It allows companies of all sizes to achieve their business objectives with minimal expenses while ensuring the high quality of their products and uninterrupted positive experience for their customers. How to obtain access to DevOps expertise then? We list the benefits of working with DevOps service providers as compared to hiring DevOps talents in-house.
Let’s first take a look at the latter variant. Suppose you want to hire a DevOps engineer in your team without having any DevOps expertise available to you. It is obvious that all the best are taken by huge corporations and leading cloud platform providers. Thus said, you have to choose from currently unemployed DevOps specialists, who are rarely first-class. In addition, unless you are situated in a startup hub like London, Berlin, Boston or Silicon Valley, hiring a top-notch software engineer locally can be quite a challenge.
Even taking this into consideration, it will take you some time to find a fitting specialist, not to mention the wages of your recruiters and HR specialists or the costs of hiring a recruitment agency. Keep in mind also that it is hard to evaluate the true skill of an applicant if you don’t have the relevant expertise yourself. This means you run the risk of hiring a person that will exaggerate their skills during interviews and will not be able to deal with the project afterward.
In addition, a group of talents is not necessarily a team and you will have to dedicate some time and effort to start a productive collaboration and ensure the person you hired performs at their full capabilities. This takes lots of time and HR efforts, as internal friction within the team can doom any projects. Besides, every employee can fall ill or want to take a day off or go on vacation — or quit your employment entirely. This means you need to have at least 2 DevOps engineers to ensure business continuity — meaning double the pay, not to mention paying for 2 office places, sets of equipment and furniture, office consumables like tea and cookies, etc.
Thus said, hiring a DevOps engineer in-house is a long and risky process with unclear outcomes, potentially bearing multiple risks and losses for your company. It ensures you are in direct control of your DevOps engineers, yes — but is it worth the nerves, especially with the alternative easily available?
The main benefit of working with DevOps service providers is that all the aforementioned hassle is their trouble, not yours. You hire a team to deliver a certain project and oversee the progress without having to deal with any of the challenges listed above.
DevOps companies select their staff themselves and train their employees to ensure their high professionalism and skill level. They have ready teams with established internal communications and workflow that work well together. These teams are cross-functional, so any other employee can replace the ill colleague and your project will not be halted. The team can start working on your project in earnest since day one and can have ready solutions for typical challenges to reduce the time-to-market for your product.
The DevOps provider handles the payments for office space and equipment, consumables and other associated expenses. The company pays for teambuilding events and training and handles all the managerial overhead. And a cherry on top of the cake — it all costs less than hiring such expertise in-house, as the cost of living overseas is much lower than in the US or EU.
We have listed the benefits of working with DevOps service providers as compared to hiring such a talent in-house, but the choice is up to you. If you have any questions — feel free to ask!