Business success is all about the invisible details that most customers—and even most professionals—will never see. 2022 ended with Amazon Web Services (AWS) controlling 32 percent of cloud infrastructure services. It’s been doing so for years, with The Verge’s policy editor Russell Brandom once describing it as, “a kind of invisible infrastructure, like water mains, submarine cables, or any of the other hidden pipes we rely on without seeing.”
But like a reflection of this invisible infrastructure, professionals and consumers also don’t see the DevOps operations or DevOps as a managed service that keeps their own corner of AWS running. If your business strategies haven’t focused on optimizing DevOps, either due to an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ or ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality, make 2024 the year you reflect on it.
Outdated models of DIY DevOps—or not having DevOps at all—can leave your company vulnerable when you don’t have the staff and resources to dedicate enough attention to the job. SMBs and startups are particularly vulnerable to the inefficiencies of older, internal development team models.
When your team is focused on internal cloud infrastructure instead of money-making apps, software, and automations, you’re sacrificing potential profits. It may be time to take a closer look at how your company’s development and ops teams currently operate and whether an outsourced solution is a better fit. Then you can focus your time and attention on your core business and revenue-generating projects.
Every Business Can Benefit from DevOps as a Managed Service, Not Just DevOps
At its simplest, DevOps is the overlap between development and operations in IT and software engineering. Depending on the size and structure of a business, it may have a dedicated DevOps team. This is typically the case in larger businesses. Smaller businesses may have one or two people on each side of ‘dev’ and ‘ops,’ or your team’s engineers may have responsibilities that span both elements.
The goal of this approach—much like with SalesOps or RevOps—is to break down the barriers between adjacent departments. DevOps specifically focuses on the intersection between IT management and software development to ensure client-facing tools are up-to-date, meet their uptime requirements, and have smoothly running, modern features.
Related: Introduction to Outsourcing Cloud for Growing Businesses
As more and more businesses switch to cloud-based services—with 94% of businesses using cloud services this year—this approach matters more than ever.
The Critical Role DevOps Plays in Modern Businesses
Think of DevOps professionals as both inventors and repair technicians. Most software and apps aren’t downloaded or sold on discs anymore. Instead, customers purchase licenses to cloud-based programs that your teams must constantly refine, patch, upgrade, and secure. The app you sell today won’t be the same as the one you sold a month ago or the one you sell in a few months, at least, not if you want it to remain beneficial to your customers.
That’s precisely how it should be. Through iterative changes and constant tweaks, your teams can:
- Insert new automations and functionalities without a big, expensive release
- Introduce new tools and repair them if they don’t quite work as designed
- Adapt your apps to new best practices regarding information security, privacy, and accessibility
3 Drawbacks of Conventional DevOps
These responsibilities naturally present challenges to small and medium-sized tech companies. Conventional DevOps centers around a team of engineers and IT experts who handle all the work in-house. But this presents several issues larger companies or companies that switched to DevOps as a managed service don’t have to worry as much about:
- You can only hire so many in-house experts. You might have the budget for one or two engineers, one general IT expert, and someone who’s worked with AWS before. Maintaining a full team of fully certified, experienced DevOps professionals simply isn’t in the budget for most tech companies.
- There are limited DevOps funds, even aside from salary concerns. A small budget is the #1 DevOps challenge cited by IT executives. Purchasing monitoring software, building internal resources, and having everything you need to manage both development projects and ongoing operations add up quickly.
- What metrics matter most? DevOps teams struggle both because they don’t know what operational metrics matter, what KPIs to prioritize, and what realistic goals look like. It’s a big black box, and that’s a problem for companies that are trying to reach new business objectives or embrace streamlined processes.
Trying to handle entirely internal DevOps can quickly overwhelm your existing staff and carve through your budget.
Benefits of Switching to DevOps as a Managed Service
DevOps as a managed service makes those challenges disappear—and not just by making them invisible, but by actually eliminating the concerns. Just like with most other ‘as a Service’ models, you are outsourcing the technical how-tos and procedural noise of getting specific tasks done—letting the experts handle it instead.
Your team focuses on core competencies, discusses what needs to be done, and pushes developmental tasks onto your third-party service. While your business is developing, a DevOps as a managed service provider is monitoring your AWS infrastructure, keeping things compliant, and balancing any changes in load throughout the seasons.
Internal DevOps vs. DevOps as a managed service is a conceptual change. The same work is getting done, but rather than hiring a handful of in-house resources to manage tasks they may or may not be experts in, you’re hiring a service that can plug specialized experts in and out of your systems as needed.
The first benefit of this that might spring to mind is ‘efficiency.’ But it goes deeper than that:
Outsource Ongoing Tasks
Repetitive or continuous tasks are a drain on your business’s resources. If your goal is to grow your operations, then you need to offload anything that requires continual effort for flat or even linearly growing value. While your company can, to some degree, automate monitoring tasks, the tools needed to do this are expensive.
Related: Defiance Digital Joins the AWS Select Partnership Program
But with outsourcing, you don’t handle the tasks at all. Instead, your trusted third-party company does, and they can get the software and the expert manpower to do so at a much lower per-unit rate because it’s what their business is all about.
Get Personalized Support
Many businesses worry that outsourcing means getting cookie-cutter, bare minimum services. But the right managed services provider starts with an in-depth exploration of how your business operates and what you need. That includes understanding your target market and how they use your apps, your business’s growth goals, the impact of seasonal demand on your AWS infrastructure, and what unique data security and regulatory requirements your company has.
The result is a fully scoped-out services package that’s uniquely tailored to your business from the start. You can take every part of DevOps off your own to-do list and know it’s being handled.
See Better Collaboration Between Development and Operations Teams
If you have a skeleton development and operations team, they’re too busy keeping up with demand to plan ahead. This, in turn, solidifies the traditional barriers that sit between departments; when there’s too much work and stress, tensions naturally brew up.
But by outsourcing AWS infrastructure management and even developmental to-dos, you give your team more breathing room. They can think more strategically about long-term improvements, product roadmaps, and ways to strengthen your business.
Keep Your Business Lean and Flexible
When you have a small or medium-sized business, every full-time employee you hire can slow down your momentum and complicate your ability to grow. Hiring full-time, salaried employees costs a lot of resources in terms of salary, onboarding time, and turnover costs. Cloud experts expect salaries in the six figures, and there are a lot of subspecialties. Each one might be crucial to your products, even if you don’t have enough work to warrant a full-time expert in each area.
Through DevOps as a managed service, you don’t have to hire a team with all the necessary expertise. Instead, your service provider hires an expansive team of experts, and each one comes on board for your projects only when they’re needed. You can use their special skills and insights without hiring an increasingly large and more expensive internal team.
Get More Than Just DevOps by Choosing DevOps as a Managed Service
DevOps is essential. But when conventional in-house DevOps is too bulky and cumbersome, DevOps as a managed service is the answer. Through this approach, you don’t have to hire expensive resources or go without them. Your teams can handle more strategic projects and know that your infrastructure is ready for business—without the headaches and turbulence of internal management.
At Defiance Digital, we serve small and medium-sized businesses with 250 employees or fewer. Our services are optimized to be cost-effective while implementing every pillar of AWS’s well-architecture framework program. Get your team focused on the strategic work. Reduce risk, reduce cost, reduce headaches, and get better sleep at night. Reach out today to offload your cloud infrastructure tasks and focus on your core business.