What Are DevOps' Consultant Roles and Responsibilities?
Businesses that invest in DevOps consulting often reap the benefits of implementing new practices.
However, if you're new to the idea, it's understandable that you may be apprehensive about what a DevOps consultant is and does and how working with one can actually impact your business.
DevOps consultants help build a bridge between development and operations teams while building and optimizing self-serve automation for dev teams.
This is a great way to streamline your business and increase value for your customers, not only because of the continual infrastructure improvements, security benefits, and time-saving practices, but it also allows your team to concentrate fully on your business and less on infrastructure and operations.
In this article, we discuss the DevOps consultant role and the difference between a DevOps consultant and DevOps engineer.
What Does a DevOps Consultant Do?
Before hiring DevOps consultants, it's important to understand a DevOps consultant's roles and responsibilities and to clearly define the deliverables and expectations.
Consultants are experienced with learning and adapting to new systems quickly and can work with little to no supervision.
Once you and your consultant discuss the work that you need to be done, they should be able to work quickly and independently.
One of the main draws businesses have for adopting DevOps methodologies is its ability to improve the capacity and delivery time of applications and services.
For example, at OpSourced, our DevOps team consists of highly experienced DevOps consultants and engineers with the technical skills to implement a wide range of DevOps processes, and are well-versed in DevOps principles, best practices, and philosophy around continuous integration and continuous delivery and can jump right into a consulting project as needed.
Because DevOps consultants are a set of outside eyes looking at your existing DevOps processes, workflows, and day-to-day operations, working with one can be a great way to get a non-biased assessment of your business processes.
Their experience working with a variety of different businesses and configuration management tools makes them uniquely qualified to assess your current systems and make suggestions that could improve your operations, availability, and speed of delivery.
Another extremely valuable role that DevOps consultants have is working alongside your employees and / or your internal DevOps teams throughout the process.
Not only can they train your team on how to use your new and improved systems, but they can also work with your team to help align your development and operations practices.
Integrating development and operations is the heart of DevOps and is a great way to streamline your business's development processes and procedures across employees and software development teams.
What's the Difference Between a DevOps Consultant and a DevOps Engineer?
While consultants and engineers can help you take advantage of the many advantages of DevOps practices, there are some crucial differences in how they work.
a. The Role of a DevOps Consultant
The role of a DevOps consultant is more suited to assist with project-based tasks, temporary issues/outages, or fixes to existing workflows or automation.
You can hire DevOps consultants to resolve a specific issue, implement automation tools, help you migrate to cloud platforms, or build out a project or system without interrupting your operations team, or train your employees.
Because they aren't permanent full-time employees, they can work on particular projects that you ask for or assess your current system and suggest changes or training for employees to improve your results.
b. The Role of a DevOps Engineer
DevOps engineers or Platform Engineers are hired as full-time members of your team.
Engineers have similar skill sets to consultants. However, because they only work for a single company, they may require more training or lack some of the problem-solving experience that an experienced DevOps consultant will have.
They're sometimes limited in scope to previous experience and projects and often don't have the same exposure to a broader swatch of technologies and tooling.
c. Types of DevOps Consultants
Businesses looking for a DevOps consultant have a few options for how they can find and hire one.
The most common options are to hire a freelance DevOps consultant or a DevOps consulting company that matches you with a consultant who works for them. Although both can be great options, hiring a freelance consultant tends to be more of a risk.
While freelancers may offer a more affordable option for companies, the money you save comes with fewer safety precautions and a higher chance of cybersecurity issues.
DevOps consulting companies like OpSourced have fine-tuned processes that will streamline your infrastructure and provide a higher level of security and efficiency based on our broad experience base.
OpSourced offers both consultancy-style and in-house engineering-style services and managed DevOps to give you flexibility for your unique business needs.
See also: Devops Consultant vs Devops Engineer: What's the Difference?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the role of a DevOps consultant?
The role of a DevOps consultant is to resolve a specific issue, implement automation tools, help you migrate to cloud platforms, or build out a project or system without interrupting your operations team, or train your employees. Because they aren't permanent full-time employees, they can work on particular projects that you ask for or assess your current system and suggest changes or training for employees to improve your results.
In Closing
Choosing to work with a DevOps consultant is a cost-effective option that can add a lot of value to your business.
Having an experienced DevOps consultant work with your business can help improve processes for you and your employees and ensure a secure and streamlined infrastructure that you won't have to worry about in the future.
OpSourced is a trusted DevOps consulting business that offers flexible packages that can be changed to fit the needs of any business or project, no matter the size.
Exploring DevOps is a wonderful way for any type of business to grow and improve, and working with OpSourced will ensure you have reliable consultants you can trust.