DevOps integrates project management, development, and operations, using shared sets of tools and practices, to improve overall team performance. While there are many benefits to using DevOps practices – such as increased efficiency and collaboration and better scaling with less overhead – adopting a DevOps culture can require significant changes to the way teams approach work and how they interact across teams. Sometimes, a team needs outside expertise to help make the transition to DevOps practices. In these cases, outsourcing your DevOps might be the right decision for your team.
DevOps outsourcing can take several forms depending on your team’s needs and budget.
If you are getting ready to tackle a one-time project where your team lacks expertise, such as a migration to the cloud or a new platform, hiring a consulting company might be a good option. Consultants can assist you with the planning and execution of the project while simultaneously training your team to take over once the migration is complete.
If your team has a good handle on the technologies you’re using and just aren’t scaling to a surge in workload, then staff augmentation could be the right solution. Your team can hire short or long term contractors to assist in areas with high work volume, under the direction and expertise of your full time employees.
But what if your team doesn’t have the background needed to manage your DevOps environment and you don’t have the budget to hire a full time in-house team? This scenario is where working with a managed service might be the ideal solution.
One of the key benefits of a DevOps managed service provider is their level of expertise. Because a managed service provider is wholly focused on DevOps, they provide some of the best industry experts who have an incredible depth of knowledge. Making a transition to DevOps is time-consuming and leveraging a team of existing experts will save you significant setup time and help you avoid common errors and pitfalls. Using a managed service provider also saves on dedicated DevOps infrastructure and staffing costs and is often easier and more cost-efficient to scale as your business needs change.
The short answer is: No. While AI DevOps solutions are changing the way we approach DevOps, they function best as a powerful tool to help engineers do their jobs better, not as a replacement for those engineers. DevOps engineers can leverage AI to write code, but that code still needs to be reviewed for quality and accuracy – because, at least for now, AI still makes mistakes. However, as a learning model, AI is also great at finding our mistakes and can help improve quality by reducing human error.
Assembla offers a variety of cloud-hosted solutions as part of its DevOps managed services, including source code hosting and management, project management, and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant security. Whether you are using Perforce, Git, or SVN, Assembla has the cloud solution to fit the needs of your team, without the overhead of self-hosting.
One of the biggest costs of adopting DevOps, if your team is not already using that model, is the staffing cost. To build a new DevOps team requires hiring dedicated engineers and additional support engineers to ensure your services remain running 24/7.
Two Point Studios shares their experience in this case study, and explains:
“As a small team, we didn’t want the burden of having to maintain such a critical service. Production-level reliability/redundancy, monitoring, logging etc are all difficult and time-consuming, and we didn’t want to take time away from developers to look after Perforce… Using Assembla has proven to be cheaper than adding a salary to our payroll.”
If your team uses more than one version control system, it can be difficult to unify your source code and DevOps processes. Assembla is the only source code hosting provider of Perforce, SVN, and Git in the cloud, under one platform. When combined with Assembla’s cloud project management software your team can unlock even more efficiency. With project management software that enables a ticketing system linking commits to issues, includes visualizations like cardwalls and task boards, and is compatible with Perforce, Git, and SVN, your team can coordinate and track projects in a central location for increased visibility.
Not only can internal adoption of DevOps be costly in terms of headcount, but the learning curve for new technologies can be steep, taking time and focus away from other engineering projects. Assembla has been hosting and optimizing Perforce in the cloud since 2012 and SVN since 2006, making us industry-leading experts. We can leverage our decades of experience to quickly and efficiently get your team set up in the cloud, and our dedicated team of DevOps engineers are available 24/7 to provide expert support.
Moving to the cloud can help speed up your commit and build times, especially for distributed teams working with large file sizes. Assembla Enterprise includes custom multi region setups using world-class hardware for Perforce, Git, and SVN. Tools like SSH acceleration improve responsiveness and handling of large file sizes, and Assembla’s cloud hosting platform often outperforms on-prem setups of Perforce and SVN. For a closer look at how Assembla can speed up your DevOps, see how we’re able to maximize Perforce performance or how we migrate your SVN or Git repos to our cloud.
Assembla Cloud clients get access to up to 1TB repository space. As your projects grow, you have the option to upgrade to Assembla Enterprise any time by contacting your customer success manager. With Assembla Enterprise there are no storage limits and you can self-manage storage limits using the Perforce Enterprise Dashboard.
If you’re ready to see how your team can benefit from using Assembla’s managed service, start a free trial today. Our team would love to talk with you about how a cloud solution can meet your DevOps needs.
