The popularity of the term DevOps has been spreading throughout the software development industry for years now. And yet, only a few end customers truly realize its potential, as most of them leave it to their development partners to create the best of products. While letting your development partners do what’s best is nowhere wrong, being educated about DevOps engineers can help you have the edge.
Once you get to know why your project needs DevOps engineers, you might as well be willing to spend a few extra bucks for the proposition that never came in the first place. Companies usually lack the resources to implement the DevOps methodology, so your development partner might even skip telling you about it. DevOps consulting companies like ours opt for it as it offers various benefits for the software development we do for our clients.
What is DevOps?
Development and Operations have been seen as two very separate components in traditional software development. DevOps is a methodology that combines both, along with QA, to obtain optimal results and reduce development time and costs. The role of a DevOps engineer is to act as an intermediary between developers and IT operations to improve software development practices, tools, and automation to reduce errors and eliminate time-wasting steps.
How DevOps Engineers Impact Your Project and its Development
Better Collaboration
DevOps engineers can coordinate with both the development team and the operations. They also stay in constant touch with the QA team and act as a collaborative channel between the three to improve the project.
Automation
The role of a DevOps engineer is to excel at automating repetitive tasks, taking the pressure off the other teams. They can set up various automation across the development cycle to improve productivity.
Transparency
In a normal software development process, none of the development or operations team knows what’s happening at the other end. The DevOps engineer adds a layer of transparency, so everyone in the system knows exactly what is happening with the product.
Process optimization
By removing redundant tasks and implementing CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery), DevOps engineers improve the release cycle. The entire process is managed from a centralized point, which helps them line up processes important at that moment.
Agility
With quicker release cycles, DevOps engineers make the entire deployment process agile. They offer continuous feedback to concerned teams to improve upon the product, and they are usually all taken care of by the time the next release is ready to go.
Better Customer Experience
With reduced delivery times and ways to take and implement customer feedback faster, many of them love DevOps. There are various practices that make customers feel better about DevOps’ way of development than the traditional ones.
Lower Costs
With proper knowledge about both the infrastructure and optimization of the production environment, DevOps engineers can significantly lower your project development cost. Along with this, they also enable automation, reduce leakages, and reduce do-overs.
Better Product
Through DevOps methodology, most of the defects in the product turn up during the development cycle and are fixed in the upcoming releases. While with traditional development methods there was no means to implement feedback midcycle, DevOps engineers can do it for you, resulting in a much better product.
What to Look for When Hiring DevOps Engineer?
Overall Experience
The overall experience will be a key factor in determining the actual work experience the engineer has. DevOps haven’t been used for decades, so you need to rely on counting experience in building different products and working in different environments.
Domain Knowledge
Domain knowledge can be a key determining factor here, as no DevOps engineer would be able to do it all in the case of a big project. You need to find the exact strengths of the engineer and the domain you want to allocate him to before proceeding to hire them based on other factors.
Core Technologies
The prospect engineer should be well versed in different automation, cloud, and administration technologies. Have a thorough interview conducted by your technology experts to check the knowledge of the DevOps engineer you plan to hire for your development project.
Soft Skills
Soft skills are a very important part of any DevOps engineer, and to ensure that he can work with your teams, you can check the diversity of previous jobs. It is the job of a DevOps engineer to keep the project teams knit together, and they should be able to handle diversity with ease.
Previous Portfolios
While the previous portfolios could be a hit or a miss due to previous NDAs signed by the engineer; you can still ask to see if he has worked for something similar. If the engineer cannot disclose information, you cannot force them to but can still ask about the broad industry experience of the projects he worked on.
Client Testimonials
Most DevOps engineers usually have a huge list of client testimonials published online, thanks to the improved client satisfaction which comes with DevOps. You can research online or simply ask the engineer you plan to hire if he has any testimonials or recommendations from a previous client he worked for.
Read More: Devops implementation in Business
Where to Hire DevOps Engineer from?
There are two basic ways to hire a DevOps engineer in today’s time; you can simply employ them full-time or hire freelancers, or augment the staff of a DevOps consulting company. The two choices given have various differences in terms of both costs and efficiency. The companies usually have the best DevOps engineers with them with maximum knowledge of multiple domains. But, if you hire someone by yourself, you will need to evaluate it based on your knowledge. Here are the two options explained:
Hiring Freelancers
Depending on the complexity of your project you can hire freelancers to save some money. They come in cheap, in abundance, and it may not be so difficult to find them online. But again, do you really want to put your project at stake? As DevOps is an integral part of development, you should weigh the benefits/cons of hiring freelancers first. In can your project coordinator, a part of the DevOps team stops replying you or leaves yours for another project, there would be no option other than putting your entire project on hold and starting over again with your search for DevOps developers.
Hiring Full-Time Engineers for Your Project
In the case of DevOps, hiring full-time staff should be the obvious choice when you ignore the downsides. But if you do, you may end up paying a lot more for employee benefits, company expenses, HR expenses, etc. On the other hand, hiring freelancers should be avoided in this case, as their leaving unexplainably can halt your entire project till the time you find a new one.
Hire Dedicated DevOps Engineer
There are various ways to hire a dedicated DevOps developer, but the most popular remains to hire from a development company. You can choose as many dedicated DevOps developers as you want and scale the team even during the development phase. Cost wise when you augment an entire team of DevOps engineers, you can save substantially compared to both of the above options. Dedicated DevOps development companies augment staff to help multiple businesses along the way and so they keep their prices in check.
Ready to Start Your Project?
DevOps has got people intrigued as a new outlook on software development, and many have embraced its benefits over the traditional methods. If your project is complex, you should probably give DevOps a try, and our consultants can help you visualize the benefits of hiring a DevOps engineer for your development project. All you need to do is contact us, and we will be happy to set up a meeting with one of our DevOps consultants and take your hiring requirements.
If you plan to hire experts, you can find the best DevOps engineers here at Matellio. We offer various hiring models to streamline the entire staff augmentation process. If you are planning to outsource the project’s development, we have the best DevOps project management in place to deliver you the perfect custom software. You can begin as early as today by contacting our experts and they will get in touch with you within 48 business hours.
