DevOps isnt a thing you can necessarily buy, it’s just a different way of delivering IT Services. It works particularly well in Cloud/Hosted Environments where routine tasks can be automated using APIs/automation scripts/procedures that enable what would ordinarily be lots of small, error prone repeatable tasks automatic.
At Factory Internet, we’ve been practicing in DevOps principles since ~2008 and have evolved ever-since with new ways of working in this field. We can help with DevOps Deployments, act as a “DevOps as a Service” type team, or just help pick-up slack in your team when you’ve a bigger project/complex change. We can also act as an advisory/sense check to ensure your team is getting the best out of working in this manner. We can simply spend some time observing, running through procedures and offering advice and guidance to fine-tune what you’re already doing.
We can offer the ability to use our knowledge and expertise to guide your own teams on the ways of working which will get you on track to getting advantages by using a DevOps style methodology.
DevOps is often a big culture change and has to exist alongside other priorities and ways of working across a business. In that model, we can help work on or run certain applications and services in an agile manner enabling you to get benefits without uplifting the wider organisation.
DevOps is a way of working which is more of a culture change than a technology change. At Factory Internet, we approach all of our own work in an Agile/DevOps manner and have been helping organisations adapt from ITIL or other methodologies to DevOps for around 7 years.
Ultimately, we’re not prescriptive on specific technologies “Just because it worked before” but are more agnostic. The field is continually changing, and at a fairly rapid pace, as such, we tend to adjust and match our recommendations to a mixture of your culture, level of technical skills and objective of your company.
At a technical level. We start with user stories, user requirements and try to understand the business purpose of what the applications are being used for. From that, we’ll then work to understand the workload and understand the best way to deploy, update and manage it in a low-risk/high-paced manner. With that, we’ll then get to the technology of Public vs Private vs Hybrid Cloud and what kind of application workload/configuration management/monitoring/data backup/security tools would be a good fit for the requirement going forward.
With DevOps Services, we can normally start working immediately. We’ll typically do an initial discovery which can be telephone/webex based. We’d then move towards an in-person meeting and following on from that start to provide services which we’d mutually define together in the first two sessions.
Of course, all engagements are different and we also provide point engagements to help briefly with advice/smaller problems or just provide some guidance and assistance.