Choosing DevOps Company: A Quick Guide

The latest world events have led to the rise of digitalization, dramatically changing companies' lives. The business needed a hero to stop slowdowns, process disruptions, and the growth of undetected bugs.

And the hero came.

The old but gold DevOps methodology gained a new level of popularity — starting from the USA and moving worldwide. DevOps creates a unified working environment within the team, raises the efficiency of processes, and enables precise continuous work on the product, efficient monitoring and managing workflows. As a result, product development is improved, a customer is satisfied, and the team is happy.

However, demand creates supply, so now we can see many DevOps companies in the IT market. This article reveals how to choose the right DevOps company to meet your business needs.

What DevOps companies offer and why you might need their help

DevOps is a bridge between developers, QA engineers and system administrators. It makes the work on the product more smooth and fast, enabling continuous development, testing and delivery in small iterations. However, companies need expertise and budgets to implement DevOps methodology by themselves. Therefore, this step is only affordable for some businesses, and some keep on working without DevOps engineers in their staff.

DevOps companies take on most chores. They provide services in many areas, namely:

• Cloud migration

Consultation on the choice of the cloud deployment model, type of cloud integration and migration priorities;

• Kubernetes clustering

Kubernetes platform orchestrates microservices, ensures that the cluster is maintained at the desired state, and makes the entire development process more flexible and resilient. Thus, if one of your app instances crashes, Kubernetes will automatically run one more app and keep the performance stable;

• Microservices architecture

Independent modules that communicate via API and enable application modernization with no harm to its functioning. In addition, microservices architecture lowers the risk that the entire system will fail and allows adding a new microservice without changing others;

• Infrastructure automation

The company organises efficient IaC tasks management, reduces the high costs of building the required infrastructure, accelerating provisioning, and realising environmental consistencies. For instance, Quema experts treat your infrastructure configuration and provisioning the same way you treat your application source code. Thus, the company helps to increase accuracy, reduce errors, and increase speed and consistency;

• Monitoring & Alerting

Tracking security holes, lack of features, non-compliance with initial requirements, and procuring real-time data from public and hybrid environments. The company provides general feedback on the overall health of the IT setup, including offsite networks and deployed software;

• SaaS architecture

Delivering a single application to many customers and smooth cloud deployment;

• Continuous testing

After being deployed on a test server, the application is checked automatically. If it does not pass unit tests, it is automatically sent for revision;

• CI/CD pipelines

Minimizing or eliminating product downtime during updates. In this practice, developers merge code into a shared repository daily, detecting problems at early stages. Some companies, like Quema, ensure that everything built by the developers can be tested and deployed to production only when you are ready;

• Compliance with the requirements

The company builds the proper DevOps strategy that would meet the regulations. 

Thus, in simple terms, a good DevOps company can significantly enhance your workflow and accelerate work on projects.

Reliable DevOps company criteria

Now you might ask — "OK, DevOps is great, but how do I know I've found the proper company to meet all my demands?"

When choosing an outsource DevOps company, pay attention to the following points.

Technical expertise is first and foremost when choosing a DevOps company. It's the same story as with any service company: you are more likely to go to a professional with vast experience.

So read the information on the company's website, take a glance at their work cases, and don't hesitate to ask them personally about their experience. Check out if their experts are familiar with infrastructure as code or configuration management tools: Terraform, CloudFormation, Chef, Saltstack and others.

The following essential point is expertise in your particular organization's tool stack. You should focus on code deployment, database management, system architecture and design. Remember that you are looking for an assistant to optimize processes — it is more than blindly following trends. So the right DevOps company should be on the same page with you, complying with your goals and policies.

Cloud experience is another pro for a DevOps company. As mentioned before, cloud migration is gaining momentum, so ensure your potential DevOps assistant keeps pace with time. For example, Quema provides cloud consulting services, including step-by-step cloud migration, cloud infrastructure design & strategy, cloud security audit, cost optimization, and cost management.

For sure, you should remember about communication. You should build strong cooperation with the DevOps company's experts to achieve a good result. So remember three essential keys to successfully implementing DevOps methodology: workflow, feedback and continuous training. You can reach it only through proper communication across teams.

Last but not least — integration of third-party solutions. At any stage of your work, you might need the latest open-source solutions and third-party tools to improve your product, and a DevOps company should assist you in implementing them. Quema experts integrate services across the entire automated workflow to ensure their seamless collaboration.

How not to lose with the choice

Although no one likes to spend much time searching, we still recommend you take your time. We have named the main criteria of a DevOps company's choice, but there are more of them.

You will work with a company side-by-side, so before you start your collaboration, get to know each other better. First, you can narrow down your options to three DevOps companies. Then, follow their work, talk to their customers, study their stack of technologies and ensure that this particular company can meet your requirements. 

Quema experts are ready to help you with any questions about implementing DevOps methodology in your company. If you want to learn more, don't hesitate to get in touch with us!