When COVID-19 hit, many companies went out of business, but many others adapted and have been growing ever since. Those businesses looked into remote teams and working from home to surpass the limitations the pandemic imposed on us, particularly those affecting those working in close quarters.
Since then, as the business world has felt the various benefits of remote teams and out-of-the-office employees, the need for outsourcing has also increased. Yes, the pandemic led to massive employment of people working in their pajamas, but it also led to multiple businesses using freelancing platforms and finding talent outside the office.
The idea of outsourcing has been around for a while, but its peak during the pandemic and its incredible popularity ever since has led to home-workers flourishing. Today we’ll discuss one part of your business you can outsource – DevOps, and how to do it efficiently.
Understanding Your Company’s Needs
Before looking for the perfect outsourced DevOps team, you’ll need to understand your company’s outsourcing capabilities. Although most companies can quickly move such functions to homeworkers or outsource them, not every company can.
First, you must investigate which parts of the company’s operations can be outsourced and whether those include a DevOps team.
If they include DevOps, you’re in luck, as an outsourced DevOps team can lead to various and significant benefits for your business, such as decreasing the time spent on programming assignments. In most cases, it’s an excellent idea, and you should be able to do it unless your infrastructure is massive and you need constant and immediate access to full-time employees.
Moreover, you’ll have to learn more about your company’s goals and possible methods of governance, communication, planning, etc., for the outsourced teams.
A Team Proficient in Containerization
Since DevOps is all about shortening the trip between your company’s idea-development stage to application deployment, you’ll need a team of DevOps experienced with containerizations, container registries, and various types of repositories.
That’s because containerization, at its core, is all about creating a perfect environment for DevOps projects to live on and quickly be shared with other members, increasing your company’s speed and automating its processes. Similarly, container registries can also be highly beneficial for your company.
Your team members should be familiar with container registries, such as JFrog, and know their way around Docker, Helm, and other generic, remote, and virtual repositories. Such DevOps members will significantly increase your company’s productivity, leading to easy image deployment, scalability, and reliability.
Experience with CI/CD
Since you’re reading this guide, chances are, you know that CI/CD stands for continuous integration and continuous delivery, respectively. The experts you’re hiring should know this, too, and they should be excellent at making sure all your company’s projects work and are getting updated on time.
When hiring a DevOps team and outsourcing this incredibly vital part with various pros and cons, you should look into employees and specialists with years of experience and a former employer’s backing.
That way, you’re ensuring your business’s market agility, ability to grow, conquer the competition, and increase revenue. These software development project experts can mean the difference between successfully managing your operations and crumbling as a company.
A Team You Can Trust
As the DevOps engineers handle many of your company’s processes, hiring the first engineer that sends in their CV isn’t the most incredible idea. Namely, their skill as software developers and IT specialists is only a part of the equation, and you must focus on the potential employee’s integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness.
These DevOps specialists should also be skilled in security, as they’ll be analyzing code and looking for vulnerabilities, investigating possible threats for a company, and managing some of your business’s highly confidential data.
Communication and Collaboration Skills
Depending on your company’s size, your DevOps department is likely a team of more than a few people. When hiring a new team member, you must look into their ability to work with others. Otherwise, you’re looking at a dysfunctional team that will overlap each other, misunderstand one another, and quickly lose productivity because of a lack of teamwork.
That’s why looking into each team member’s communication skills is essential. Find out where they’ve worked before and who they’ve worked with. Require a letter of recommendation from their former employer, or ask around to learn more about their teamwork ability.
Even after discovering everything you can, you should set them up for a trial period and focus on their collaboration first rather than their DevOps skills to see how well they can work in a team.
Conclusion
As many businesses are moving to working from home and outsourcing large parts of their company’s processes, such as DevOps, having a few things in mind when hiring such workers is vital to your company’s performance, success, and profits.
When it comes to finding DevOps specialists that won’t be your full-time employees, you’ll need to look into their experience with container registries, knowledge of deployment platforms, and understanding of CI/CD, but also their trustworthiness and ability to work in teams and collaborate.