Many companies worldwide strive to use DevOps as an instrument to offer their customers software and important updates, but implementing the DevOps workflow is still challenging. You will need to find a high quality provider with tested CI/CD patterns that combine a great deal of automation, allowing you to focus solely on developing and enhancing your product.

Although you may have an innovative product like GM did back in the day, since then much has changed and you don’t have to do everything yourself any longer. DevOps as a service allows your engineers, instead of worrying about infrastructure, to focus on the most important thing, the product.

Tons of companies and agencies offer DevOps as a service solution in the ever-changing IT landscape nowadays. Thus, how do you distinguish between good and others and decide which one works for you? Is it only a question of technology and of knowledge of good practice in DevOps?? It is indeed a combination of technical skills, the knowledge of DevOps, and the simple old advisory knowledge. Here are some of the things you need to remember when searching for a DevOps service provider.

You need empathy

When you meet a potential provider for the first time, make sure they listen actively to what you are trying to convey to them. You must get the statement of the problem.

You will be asked by a good DevOps provider if all the issues were properly understood or not. Empathy is the keyword here. You must be in a position to put yourself in your shoes. If you were the customer, your service provider would like to reflect the problem statement before entering all DevOps metrics.

Instinctive action by many providers of DevOps, in particular the most experienced. You were there, you did, and you will be quick to propose potential solutions and DevOps KPIs to monitor to reach them. Therefore if you’re in the process of describing the problems, the potential service provider will put a red flag in two cents about release and deployment management or anything else.

Furthermore, if you have invited them to identify processes which need to be changed on site, they should spend at least one week in your company to identify inefficient processes. If they do not spend too little time on the site, they will take advantage of the continuous integration by implementing a solution. For instance, they will find some kind of obstacle halfway through the implementation of the process that might have been identified and avoided from the beginning.

Therefore make sure you feel comfortable with you and approach the job methodically, in addition to inquiring about your technics, experience and DevOps IQ.

You must be open-minded

DevOps is often called “Agile Delivery,” as DevOps and Agile are closely connected. If this is further extrapolated, many of us believe that DevOps implementation can only be achieved in Agile teams.

Most experts agree that you can make full use of the DevOps methodology within Agile’s teams, but there may be good reasons why your company uses the Waterfall model. If that is the case, DevOps consultants must be in a position to formulate concepts to enable you to win quickly. This could, for example, reduce construction and deployment time from several hours to minutes. This goal could be viewed by the service provider as being flimsy, but it could take your team a lot of pressure and give them time to look for other optimizations. If you realize that you are reflecting some basic Agile methodologies during such optimizations, you should consider making a commitment to such a change.

However, you should not use DevOps as a mandatory condition for DevOps process implementation in your Agile processes.

You should have the experience you need

The DevOps service provider you employ should have at least a five-year experience with Puppet, Ansible, Chef, SaldStack, and Python, PHP and Java automation tools. You should also know Jenkins, CruiseControl and CruiseCrontrol.NET, just to name a few, continuous integration tools. They also have code deployment experience, database management, software architecture system design and experience.

Be sure to ask whether they have project management, risk management or Scrum Masters certifications, or any experience in these fields when interviewing applicants. It is not important that the service provider be located because it may not be in the same city, state, or even country that best fits your particular needs.

In order to follow and study the processes and make recommendations on how to fix them it will be necessary that the DevOps consultant travels to your site anyway, so that point A – B can be travelled in relatively little time and on budget in today’s world.

Although the service provider needs no knowledge of your particular business sector, they should understand very clearly that your company’s business needs and technological changes must go hand in hand. All they do needs to be founded on sound corporate principles. Before discussing any procedural changes, be sure to discuss all business outcomes you would like to see from DevOps implementation.

While DevOps consultant’s demands are extremely stringent, the requirements are not much lighter for your engineers. They should be able to design and operate a software stack and experts in both Docker, Chef, Puppet, Jenkins and MongoDB, all of which will be project-specific. Ingineers must have soft skills,

as with DevOps consultants. This includes empathy, communication skills, integrity and a desire to improve and build their skills continuously.

You should not go to conclusions

Most DevOps solutions providers work with many customers, which means it could be very easy for them to start talking about how ineffective the processes of your business are, and the more often they have, the easier it is for them to get into the situation.

A good DevOps service provider will do all they can to prevent such a thinking and try to find the underlying reasons for these processes. They should begin to ask you why you decided to take such a process, rather than telling you how awful everything is. For example, if the building time is about two hours and a half, they need to go inside and solve the problem instead of getting into your face and telling you about it. Maybe an old ANT script is used?

Perhaps it’s another thing. The end result is that they are not supposed to come in and judge on day one. You must learn all the processes and then provide your feedback, learn why you are using them, and then find solutions for fixing them.

Encourage a friendly environment

There’s plenty of information about Agile and its approach to the loss of the human element. It’s going to cause problems regardless of methodology, if the team members simply do not get along. The service provider DevOps must be able to build a team who understands the problems of each other and looks forward to helping each other.

The service provider must set an example for itself in order to build such a team.

You should have lunch with your team once in a while, promote daily stand-up meetings and discuss your concerns with team members. You don’t need a cold, unsatisfactory group because this is not the team definition.

From my personal experience, a product team leader did not participate in stand-up meetings because “higher priority” was given to the work. As you can imagine, this caused great frustration among other team members, because if the team leader does not participate there is no point in having such a meeting.

The service provider should therefore be able to mesh and form a true team that has the same priorities and is located on the same page.

The service provider should therefore be able to mesh and form a true team that has the same priorities and is located on the same page.

See the displays out

You’ll be overwhelmed by an avalanche of tools if you search quickly Google for “DevOps Continuous integration tools” or other tools. Nearly every consulting service in DevOps has worked with or delivers these solutions, and all providers of DevOps solution have their own favorite tools.

In the end, they use your favorite tools and try to fit them in every way they can at any client’s site. They will also try to impress you by throwing the names of these instruments and babbling at their features, or boost their own ego.

In most cases, the customer is less technologically knowledgeable and simply seeks a solution for a business problem. If you bring someone to an interview and they start to give you a list of tools or a certain technical jargon, this is a sign that it won’t work.

What we suggest is to select and discuss a process with the prospective service provider that you would like to refine. You can, for instance, take your company somewhere else, only to attempt to optimize a build process and to get the application into the cloud, dismantle the monolithic architecture and 20 tools.

This is not to inform you about how to optimize ineffective processes, but it must be done in a gradual manner. They should give you a problem statement, ask whether you want to think about a few steps in the future and, if the answer is yes, take some great changes.

In fact, a good consultant has something that will try and describe the jargon in terms you can understand and explain it all to you.

The Virtue is Patience

It’s not going to be overnight to use a team that does something in one way and instills agile thinking and takes up DevOps Services Company. Actually, it won’t happen two or three months later, since processes and working practices need to be changed. They should not fight their way because it only adds to their antagonism, hatred, and resentment, and they are also more and more frustrated.

A good service provider will sit with you and agree on expectations. A good service provider. When drawing up the statement of work together with the provider, they must realize that patients are needed and that things are probably not as smooth as they think and are responsible for all this. An open-source tool can take months to adopt in many situations, which they might think is obvious. Ask the service provider how this change affects the security of DevOps. How will the processes of change management look? Who is the owner and the technical owner of the business?

Safety at the last stage of development was again the responsibility of an isolated team. When the development cycle lasted months or even years, it was not so big a problem but it wasn’t that long ago.

From the very beginning, a good DevOps will involve security teams and create a security automation plan. This includes determining the risk tolerance and carrying out a risk/benefit analysis in order to determine the safety controls required for a particular application. As with the regular DevOps method, DevSecOps also needs repetitive automation tasks, because security checks within the pipeline could take a lot of time manually.

Make sure the latest technologies are up to date

Many consultants of DevOps work on a project for a long time and will therefore remain in the swamp of daily supplies. Instead of getting acquainted with new technologies, they will prioritize the deliverables more. Even if they have been working on one project for only many years, they must be able to change equipment and work on something completely different, and what they have been doing in the past is completely irrelevant.

Did you learn the new technology on the market by yourself? It’s definitely a bad sign if the answer is “no.’

Most DevOps solutions providers work with many customers, which means it could be very easy for them to start talking about how ineffective the processes of your business are, and the more often they have, the easier it is for them to get into the situation.

A good DevOps service provider will do all they can to prevent such thinking and try to find the underlying reasons for these processes. They should begin to ask you why you decided to take such a process, rather than telling you how awful everything is. For example, if the building time is about two hours and a half, they need to go inside and solve the problem instead of getting into your face and telling you about it. Maybe an old ANT script is used?

Perhaps it’s another thing. The end result is that they are not supposed to come in and judge on day one. You must learn all the processes and then provide your feedback, learn why you are using them and then find solutions for fixing them.

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