1/ You have gone and cracked it – well done!
In business terms this means you have massively reduced your infrastructure costs AND you can deliver high-quality, scalable, digital product and internal systems faster than any of your competitors.
In technical terms it means you wouldn’t consider building software unless it was test-driven and within a continuous delivery framework – all well and good but many are at this stage. However, you also have high quality infrastructure as code (IaC) meaning you can spin up and tear down data centre scale environments in minutes. Security is baked in from day one and failover, auto-scaling, auto-healing is not a problem and Chaos Monkey is your friend. You know not only how to spell Kubernetes but can actually make containerisation work at scale. Your system response times are lightning fast due to content delivery networks and in some cases serverless cloud solutions. Naturally you are also making full use of what the cloud was designed for so nothing is ever up and running when not in use and things like clustering for your latest big data project is a breeze.
Your developers don’t laugh nervously, cry or resign when you tell them that new system they are building they will also be providing free 24/7 support for?
2/ Somewhere in the middle
If you’re working for an organisation that have accomplished all of the above then please contact us immediately, in confidence, as we want to offer you a job!
More likely you have accomplished some of the above. Tell-tale signs of this stage can be varied but some of the more high-level ones can include:
- Business being unconfident about internal IT’s ability to deliver what they need and within timescales required.
- Operations not being completely on-board even though it will dramatically make their working lives easier.
- A high reliance on specialist, expensive DevOps contract resource. With tacit knowledge stored in their heads rather than your own staff.
- Decreasing standardisation & best practice. With management pondering whether DevOps was just an excuse for their team to play around with lots of new tech.
- Snowballs would have a better chance in hell than your developers signing up to free 24/7 support of the systems they build!
- You’ve tried DevOps made little progress and stakeholders can’t see the benefit in automation or any cost savings from the cloud.
3/ Don’t know what DevOps is
Why isn’t it called OpsDev out of interest?
HOW WE CAN HELP
By now you will have worked out that we have been slightly underhand as, with a few honourable exceptions, practically everyone falls into stages 2 or 3. However, we really can, and do, get our customers to stage number 1 if they’re ready to go there.
We have consultants and engineers available in April 2017. We have a finite number which we will offer on a first come first served basis. Prior to this we’re very happy for you to check us out so if you require case studies or references please do contact us.
As a consultancy we’re used to and actively encourage flexible engagement models. So if you need someone for a day, or a year, fixed price or T&M we are here to listen to what you need.