Hiring a DevOps Contractor

Measure twice and cut once with an experienced DevOps contractor to kickstart your team.

Target: Establish a DevOps strategy for your team that can evolve with your product.

Why A Contractor?

• Leverage the experience and lessons learned from professional DevOps engineers without devoting the capital to building a team in house.

• Allow your developers to build off the scaffolding and discover which engineers excel in DevOps and organically build your in house team.

Rationale

No matter what stage your product is in, programmatic infrastructure, configuration, and security are a necessity. Hiring an experienced DevOps team is a costly endeavor and for a lot of projects, full time SRE and DevOps probably isn’t yet sensible.

An alternative approach is bringing in an experienced contractor to set up the backbone of your DevOps practices and let your developers take ownership. An experienced contractor will bring with them the wisdom from lessons learned the hard way saving you time and money in the long run.

As your developers take over ownership of the DevOps lifecycle you will uncover which people are drawn to and excel at this work, allowing you to organically create an SRE or DevOps team as your product scales.

Financial

The average Senior DevOps engineer salary is $125,000 annually, if you look at Senior SRE it jumps to $150,000. For a team without any existing DevOps or SRE practices this is money that could probably be more effectively spent. Leading up to product launch and scale a full time engineer focusing on Ops probably doesn’t make a lot of sense either.

For a fraction of the price you could bring in an experienced DevOps engineer to scaffold and document a resilient scalable process. From here your team could build on the established processes as your product grows. As your product continues to gain market share you’ll either have a handful of engineers that have mastered the operations stack and can take the helm from here, or if changes are seldom necessary a continued relationship with the contractor might be the optimal route for your team.

Cape Fear Cloud is available today to discuss your path to DevOps. Reach out for a free quote and consultation to see if we are what your team is looking for.