The software development landscape has changed dramatically in recent years with the widespread adoption of agile methodologies, cloud platforms, and DevOps practices. Businesses must deliver high-quality software faster than ever before to remain competitive. However, many organizations struggle to implement modern development best practices on their own. This is where managed DevOps services come in.
The Challenges of Adopting DevOps
DevOps is a culture, movement and practice that emphasizes collaboration, communication, integration and automation between software developers and IT operations professionals. The goals are to build, test, release and monitor applications faster and more reliably. DevOps enables continuous delivery and deployment.
However, adopting DevOps comes with many challenges, including:
Transitioning from traditional waterfall development to DevOps requires a major cultural shift. Developers and ops engineers are accustomed to working in siloes with infrequent communication. Breaking down these barriers between teams can meet resistance.
Complex Toolchains
Implementing a DevOps toolchain requires integrating many complex tools, including version control, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) automation, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and more. Each tool requires expertise to configure, integrate and manage.
Steep Learning Curve
DevOps engineers need knowledge of development, testing, security and operations. Most organizations don't readily offer such versatile skill sets, so upskilling or hiring people with DevOps skills poses a challenge.
No Existing Processes
DevOps requires developing processes around collaboration, integration, testing and release management. It is demanding to define new processes and workflows from scratch.
Why Look to a Managed Service?
Given the difficulties of adopting DevOps, many organizations find getting a DevOps initiative off the ground challenging without outside help. Handing DevOps off to a seasoned managed service provider can help companies overcome these barriers more easily.
Benefits of managed DevOps include:
A mature managed DevOps provider brings experience from implementing best practices across multiple clients and verticals. For example, a provider serving enterprise financial services firms will have pre-built pipelines, policies, compliance controls and architectures that translate easily to a new banking client.
Rather than requiring months of internal meetings to determine requirements, a managed service can get up and running in weeks based on established deliverables. Their specialized knowledge kickstarts adoption and bypasses 12-18 months of process development, typically seen with in-house DevOps standups.
For example, one managed DevOps client with a 2-year DevOps backlog planned to finally launch after bringing on a service provider. The managed provider’s out-of-the-box automation enabled them to ship their first release in just 8 weeks.
Proven Best Practices
According to the State of CI/CD Report 2024, 83% of developers were engaged in DevOps-related tasks like security testing, performance monitoring, or continuous integration and distribution (CI/CD) as of the first quarter of 2024.
Seasoned managed DevOps firms incorporate best practices refined over years of experience nurturing DevOps evolutions across vastly different clients. This avoids new adopters having to reinvent the wheel or repeat common missteps.
For example, they bring expertise around:
- Security-first pipelines are designed from the ground up to avoid risks
- Infrastructure templates optimized for cost, performance and reliability
- Parallel testing procedures that accelerate defect discovery
- Automated rollback protocols minimizing production failures
It is difficult for newly minted internal DevOps teams to match this level of specialized knowledge. Leveraging proven expertise jumpstarts maturity.
End-to-End Management
Fully-managed DevOps offloads the burden of toolchain integration, process coordination and team management onto the service provider. This frees up internal developers and ops talent to focus on shipping great products rather than building scaffolding.
For resource-constrained groups, the overhead of integrating and learning new tools like Spinnaker, Prometheus and Grafana while keeping existing systems afloat becomes untenable. Handing the operational challenges to specialists alleviates these pressures.
For example, one client lacked the expertise to migrate from Jenkins to Spinnaker. Their managed provider owned the end-to-end Spinnaker implementation and pipeline modernization effort while developers focused on feature work.
Flexible Resourcing
Managed services offer flexibility to scale skilled DevOps engineers up or down on-demand to meet needs. Ramping up internal DevOps teams requires months of interviewing, hiring, onboarding and training. Scaling down means painful staff cuts.
Providers maintain talent benches that allow dynamically sizing teams to current workloads and budgets. For example, they could set up 20 developers for a new product launch and dial back to ongoing sustaining levels after launch. Avoiding hard staffing choices simplifies scaling.
Risk Mitigation
Experienced providers have governance, controls, redundancy safeguards, and SLAs in place to ensure security, compliance and reliability. This reduces the business risk associated with application failures.
An outage on a provider’s watch damages their reputation far more than internal teams. The threat of lost business incentivizes managed services to architect highly-available and resilient environments.
For example, most providers offer 99.95% application uptime guarantees, with financial penalties if SLAs are not met. This attention to production excellence reduces downtime risk.
Key Capabilities to Look For
Not all managed DevOps offerings are created equal. Here are key capabilities to look for from providers:
Mature Toolchain
Look for providers that offer a complete, integrated DevOps toolchain with CI/CD automation and infrastructure such as code, monitoring, logging, test automation, and more. Integrating disparate point solutions is challenging.
Flexible Deployment
The provider should support deploying to public clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, as well as private clouds and on-premise infrastructure, avoiding lock-in to a single platform.
Security and Compliance Expertise
Applications must meet stringent security and compliance requirements. Managed providers should have policies, technologies and certifications in place to address industry regulations.
Global Delivery Capability
To accelerate delivery around the clock, providers should provide follow-the-sun support with development centers across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions.
Agile Development
Managed services should be compatible with agile and iterative approaches. Look for experience with agile methodologies, sprints and close collaboration.
Automation and AI Ops
Leading managed DevOps providers are increasingly incorporating AI and ML into operations to automate manual tasks like alert triage and resolution. Advanced automation delivers efficiency.
Evaluating Managed DevOps Providers
Once you decide to investigate managed DevOps, use the following criteria when evaluating providers:
Toolchain Capabilities - Assess the breadth of their toolchain out-of-the-box integrations for CI/CD, infrastructure such as code, monitoring, and more.
Technical Expertise - Review the skills and experience of the proposed delivery team. Look for expertise across cloud platforms, infrastructure, security, testing and agile development.
Delivery Model - Understand how they structure engagements, interact with your developers and deliver continuous updates. Look for flexibility to adapt to your needs.
Security - Confirm that they follow the best practices in secure development and have the right certifications to meet your requirements.
Reliability - Request for specific application availability guarantees and statistics. Ensure that they meet your reliability criteria.
Pricing Model - Compare monthly subscription pricing and options versus hiring and maintaining an internal team. Consider flexibility to scale up and down.
Customer References - Speak to current customers about their experience working with the provider and the business outcomes achieved.
Key Takeaways
Here are the critical points to remember when considering managed DevOps:
- Adopting DevOps in-house can be challenging for resource-constrained IT teams. Managed services accelerate time-to-value.
- Experienced providers incorporate proven processes, best practices and automation to fast-track DevOps maturity.
- Fully managed options offload the burdens of toolchain integration, process definition and team management.
- Leading managed DevOps providers offer complete toolchains with advanced automation and AI ops capabilities.
- When evaluating providers, consider technical expertise, delivery model, security posture, SLAs and pricing flexibility.
For IT managers who are finding it challenging to get started with DevOps, managed services offer a quick way to get to continuous delivery, reliability and quality. Working with a managed DevOps service provider means that the internal staff can concentrate on creating great products while relying on the provider’s knowledge. The result is improved software with quicker development, which drives competitiveness. The path of managed services provides the ground for the success of DevOps.
