Managed DevOps services: what you actually get.

Q: How is managed DevOps different from DevOps consulting?

Consulting is project-based — architect something, hand it over, leave. Managed DevOps is a continuous operational relationship. We do the design work too, but we are still here six months later running the pipelines we built, responding to the alerts, and optimising what we deployed. The knowledge does not leave with a deliverable.

Q: Do we lose control of our infrastructure if we engage managed DevOps?

No. All credentials, cloud accounts and repositories stay in your name. We operate under a named Google / GitHub / AWS IAM identity with scoped permissions. The IaC lives in a repository you own. If the engagement ends, you have a working, documented platform — not an empty space where our access used to be.

Q: Can you take over an existing DevOps setup instead of rebuilding?

Yes, and that is the more common path. We start with an audit of the pipelines, IaC, monitoring and incident history, then incrementally improve what works and replace only what is actually broken. Full greenfield is rare — most engagements inherit a mix of Terraform, Ansible, custom scripts and some clickops, and we absorb that state rather than demand a clean start.

Q: What is the minimum team size where this makes economic sense?

Below ~10 engineers, a hosted platform (Heroku, Render, Fly.io) is usually cheaper than managed DevOps. Between 10–25 engineers the economics tip — you outgrow packaged platforms but have not hit the threshold where a full-time DevOps hire (and the risk of that single point of failure) makes sense. That window is the sweet spot. Above 100 engineers in-house DevOps teams are typically justified.

Q: How do you work alongside our existing engineering team?

Shared Slack / incident channel, published change calendar, joint post-incident reviews when infrastructure is involved. Typical split: your developers own application code + application-level metrics; we own underlying infrastructure + platform-level alerts + the CI/CD pipelines. Deployment gates are documented so either side can trigger a release safely.

Q: What happens when we eventually hire an in-house DevOps engineer?

Some clients do, eventually. We document the setup as we build it specifically so the handover is possible. When the in-house hire starts, we typically move to a consultative role — less day-to-day operations, more architecture review + escalation support for issues outside their experience range. We do not cling to scope.

Managed DevOps is not "we do your Terraform for you." It is an engineering relationship that owns the platform your developers deploy onto — pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, orchestration, observability and incident response — so your product team never has to context-switch into infrastructure work.

The actual scope of managed DevOps

When a mid-market company asks for "DevOps services" they usually mean one of five different things. Clarifying which you actually need is the first conversation. Managed DevOps — the model we run — covers all five but with different weightings per engagement:

CI/CD pipeline engineering — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or self-hosted runners. Designed around your repo topology, with cached build stages, parallel test matrices, and deployment gates. We write the pipelines, maintain them as the app evolves, and respond when they break.
Infrastructure-as-code — Terraform / OpenTofu / Pulumi for cloud resources, Ansible for in-VM configuration. Your environment becomes reproducible from git rather than assembled by clickops.
Container orchestration — Kubernetes for platforms with 20+ services, Docker Compose / Nomad for simpler setups. We design the cluster topology, set up ingress + cert rotation, configure autoscaling, and handle upgrades.
Observability — metrics, logs and traces via the stack that fits your scale: Prometheus + Grafana + Loki / Tempo for mid-market, Datadog / New Relic when the ops burden of self-hosting is not worth it. Dashboards and alerts tuned to actual SLOs, not every metric.
Incident response & on-call — 24/7 rotation on our side for production alerts. We investigate, resolve, and write the post-incident review. Your engineers sleep through most nights.

A typical engagement week is 60% operations + 40% improvements. Not the other way around.

Managed DevOps vs. the alternatives

Model	What you get	What you pay for	When it fits
In-house DevOps hire	A single engineer (or team) embedded	Salary + recruiter + benefits + onboarding time	50+ engineers, ops work exceeds 1 FTE
Staff augmentation	Contract DevOps by the hour	Hourly rate, ramp-up time, knowledge re-siloed each engagement	Short-term project-based work
DevOps-as-a-service tool	Abstractions over cloud providers (Heroku, Render, etc.)	Per-dyno / per-seat pricing, platform lock-in	Early-stage, <10 engineers, no custom infra needs
Managed DevOps partner	Team that owns the platform outcome	Monthly retainer, scope defined up front	10–100 engineer orgs where DevOps is <1 FTE of ongoing work but critical when it breaks

Signals you should be evaluating managed DevOps

The decision is usually triggered by one of these patterns. If two or more apply, the economics favour managed DevOps over the alternatives:

One engineer owns "infrastructure" as a side responsibility and is now a single point of failure for your deploy pipeline.
Production incidents happen outside business hours and nobody has a written on-call rotation.
CI/CD time has crept from 5 minutes to 25+ and nobody has the bandwidth to investigate the caching / parallelism wins.
You are migrating from Heroku / Render / Fly / similar PaaS and need hands-on Terraform work.
A compliance audit (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR) is on the roadmap and the evidence generation is manual today.
Your monitoring is "we got the email at 9 AM that PagerDuty sent at 3 AM" — alerts exist but response is not structured.

What a managed DevOps engagement looks like in the first 90 days

We run the same four-phase structure as the rest of our service — analyze → design → migrate → operate — but with DevOps-specific deliverables:

Week 1–2 (Analyze): Audit of your current pipelines, deployment workflow, incident history, monitoring coverage, and production runbook (or lack thereof). Written audit document with a prioritised risk register.
Week 3 (Design): Target state — pipeline design, IaC repo structure, monitoring stack choice, on-call rotation proposal. Signed off before any change.
Week 4–8 (Migrate): Implement. New CI pipelines run in parallel to existing ones until verified. Terraform adopted incrementally — existing resources imported, new ones created IaC-first. Monitoring rolled out before incident response transfers.
Week 9+ (Operate): We are the on-call rotation for production infrastructure. Monthly reports on pipeline performance, incident count, MTTR, cost attribution. Quarterly architecture review for drift and new requirements.

Cost framework

Pricing scales with the number of services in scope and the on-call tier, not with the cloud spend beneath it. As a rough guide:

Core DevOps — CI/CD + IaC + basic monitoring for 1–3 applications. Typical retainer starts in the low-to-mid 4-figure range monthly. 24/7 on-call not included.
Platform DevOps — the Core scope plus container orchestration, multi-environment promotion, advanced observability, and business-hours incident response. Typical range: mid-to-high 4-figure monthly.
Full managed — Platform scope plus 24/7 on-call rotation, monthly SLO review, quarterly cost optimisation. Typical range: low-to-mid 5-figure monthly depending on service count and compliance scope.

Exact pricing always quoted after the analysis phase — we do not sell packaged tiers without knowing the actual scope.

Frequently asked questions

How is managed DevOps different from DevOps consulting?

Consulting is project-based — architect something, hand it over, leave. Managed DevOps is a continuous operational relationship. We do the design work too, but we are still here six months later running the pipelines we built, responding to the alerts, and optimising what we deployed. The knowledge does not leave with a deliverable.

Do we lose control of our infrastructure if we engage managed DevOps?

No. All credentials, cloud accounts and repositories stay in your name. We operate under a named Google / GitHub / AWS IAM identity with scoped permissions. The IaC lives in a repository you own. If the engagement ends, you have a working, documented platform — not an empty space where our access used to be.

Can you take over an existing DevOps setup instead of rebuilding?

Yes, and that is the more common path. We start with an audit of the pipelines, IaC, monitoring and incident history, then incrementally improve what works and replace only what is actually broken. Full greenfield is rare — most engagements inherit a mix of Terraform, Ansible, custom scripts and some clickops, and we absorb that state rather than demand a clean start.

What is the minimum team size where this makes economic sense?

Below ~10 engineers, a hosted platform (Heroku, Render, Fly.io) is usually cheaper than managed DevOps. Between 10–25 engineers the economics tip — you outgrow packaged platforms but have not hit the threshold where a full-time DevOps hire (and the risk of that single point of failure) makes sense. That window is the sweet spot. Above 100 engineers in-house DevOps teams are typically justified.

How do you work alongside our existing engineering team?

Shared Slack / incident channel, published change calendar, joint post-incident reviews when infrastructure is involved. Typical split: your developers own application code + application-level metrics; we own underlying infrastructure + platform-level alerts + the CI/CD pipelines. Deployment gates are documented so either side can trigger a release safely.

What happens when we eventually hire an in-house DevOps engineer?

Some clients do, eventually. We document the setup as we build it specifically so the handover is possible. When the in-house hire starts, we typically move to a consultative role — less day-to-day operations, more architecture review + escalation support for issues outside their experience range. We do not cling to scope.

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Evaluating managed DevOps?

Tell us about your current setup, team size, and what is breaking. We will map out what managed DevOps would cover and what it would cost.

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