How to Find the Right DevOps Consultant For You
Integrating DevOps into your business can provide a number of benefits, like improving the productivity and efficiency of your operations.
But, creating and implementing DevOps in your business can be difficult and time-consuming, especially if you don't have any experience with DevOps best practices. That's where DevOps consultants come in.
DevOps consulting services provide technical expertise and help with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), and anything else you need in your software development cycle—resulting in continuous improvement.
While there are many options out there for DevOps services, the right decision for you and your business will likely come down to your specific DevOps needs.
Read on for a quick overview on what development and operations teams do, and how to find DevOps consultant services that are the right fit for your DevOps implementation.
What Do DevOps Consultants Do?
DevOps consultants can work on any DevOps-related project that you need to support your business.
These are some common practices that the best DevOps consulting firms provide:
1. Fix Regular Problems
If you have a consistent bug or problem in your operating system that is impacting performance or profitability, hiring a DevOps consultant is a great way to address it.
A consultant can address the problem in your system so your team doesn't have to take attention away from other tasks.
A DevOps consultant can also bring expertise to your team for problems you may not have internal resources to address.
2. Optimize Tools and Teams
Using DevOps in your business can offer a variety of benefits, including boosting your efficiency, facilitating the implementation of new software, automation tools, DevOps tools, project management, and ensuring faster software delivery to market.
Especially if you are not a software or tech-based business, hiring a DevOps professionals to help you with the software development lifecycle is the fastest way to achieve these benefits.
3. Provide Frequent Updates
It's understandable that a common concern of businesses hiring an outside consultant is that they'll pay for the consultant and never hear from them again.
To safeguard against this look for a DevOps agency where client accountability and communication are a main priority. For example, at OpSourced, our DevOps teams make sure that you have a direct line of communication with the engineer working on your project. This allows them to coordinate with you in real time and to communicate any questions or changes that might arise regarding your DevOps processes.
Working with DevOps experts saves you the time and money of hiring a full-time DevOps engineer and provides you with someone familiar with best practices related to DevOps culture who can quickly adapt to working on new systems.
Unlike a solo freelance DevOps consultant, an experienced consulting company typically has more robust experience and systems to implement changes quickly to help your business.
How to Hire the Right DevOps Consultant for Your Business
Like hiring for any position, not every DevOps consultant will be the perfect fit for every business.
Before you agree to work with someone and sign them on to be a part of your team, you should consider a few important factors to ensure a successful DevOps journey.
Step 1. Learn About Their History
It's important that the DevOps consultant you chose can provide you with the results you're looking for.
This is especially important if you're considering hiring a freelance consultant because they don't work for a trusted DevOps service provider that can vouch for them and their skills.
On the other hand, choosing a DevOps provider like OpSourced removes some of the stress of vetting your DevOps consultant. As an experienced and reliable consulting company, our DevOps engineers are held to a standard not every DevOps company can meet.
A lot of DevOps companies sign NDAs before working with clients, so there might be limited information about their background or work available online, but you can still do some research into their working history.
You can read any client reviews or ask questions about their history to gain as much insight into their history as possible.
Step 2. Consider Their Expertise
When discussing the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps consultant, you must consider more than just their technical training.
An ideal DevOps consultant is experienced with a variety of technology and can assume responsibility for all business operations.
For instance, at OpSourced, to help make sure we can satisfy our clients, we thoroughly vet all of our DevOps engineers to ensure that they are experienced and measure up to our rigorous standards before they are given the responsibility of managing our clients' infrastructure.
Step 3. Look for the Right Skills
Beyond making sure your consultant has expertise across a wide array of DevOps practices, it's also important that you choose to work with a DevOps consultant who has the right skills for what your business specifically needs.
At OpSourced, we have a variety of DevOps engineers with different skill sets and specializations. This helps us make sure that we have someone available to work on any type of project.
See also: Devops Consultant vs Devops Engineer: What's the Difference?
Step 4. Beware of Overconfidence
While we have the utmost confidence in our consultants, overconfidence is important to be wary of.
When initially discussing your needs, some DevOps consultants might thoughtlessly agree that they can provide everything in your DevOps strategy.
Remember to be cautious to ensure you get everything you need and are promised by your DevOps consultant.
For instance, OpSourced will never agree to a project that our engineers can't handle, but not all DevOps consulting companies operate that way.
Step 5. Communication Skills
Communication skills are an important aspect of hiring a consultant. Because they are not fully part of your team, getting in touch with them or getting information about their progress might be an issue.
This is a major concern for many companies, so we've worked hard to find the best way for businesses to communicate with the DevOps engineer working on their project.
We know that communication is a priority, and we've discovered that Slack is a great resource that allows us to communicate easily with clients and our internal teams.
Before any work is done, we set up a Slack channel between our DevOps engineer and anyone on your team you would like to have included. This allows you the ability to communicate about your project in real-time whenever you need. The slack channel is also a great way to ensure that everyone on your end is up-to-date with the progress.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the difference between a DevOps consultant and a DevOps engineer?
The job description of a DevOps engineer can vary pretty significantly between development and operations teams, but they’re usually associated with software delivery and software development, with a focus on day-to-day operations, new tools, automation, monitoring, and alert response. On the other hand, a DevOps consultant is an outside consultant who’s brought in to provide direction or give insight or staff augmentation on specific projects.
In closing
When giving someone else control to change how your business functions, it's important to make sure you've found someone you trust who's a good fit for you and your company.
DevOps consulting is a great way to support your business and improve your efficiency and operations, but it won't be as efficient if you work with a DevOps company that can't meet your needs.
Investing in an expert consultant is the best way to make major changes to your operations that will positively impact your company's future.
OpSourced is a reliable DevOps consulting company with experienced engineers with a wide range of specialties and skills. to learn more about how OpSourced might be a good fit for your DevOps consulting needs.