Cloud strategy consulting from IT Svit
Every startup or small-to-medium business wants to run their IT operations in the most cost-efficient and performant way. Many go for cloud computing, due to its pay-per-use billing system, high scalability and security. However, to utilize all the cloud features to the fullest extent, a business must have an in-depth understanding of all the settings and configuration nooks and crannies.
Obtaining such expertise is a hard task for any business, for a variety of reasons:
- It’s hard to find skilled DevOps specialists. There are more vacancies on the job market, than candidates willing to take them. Hiring just some DevOps expertise is a sure way to future problems, and finding a decent DevOps specialist in-house can take quite a long time. The reason for this situation is that DevOps engineers want to have access to the latest technology and tools when they work on their projects so that they can experiment, master new instruments, improve their skills and grow as professionals.
This is the direct opposite of working for a single company for prolonged periods of time, using outdated technology and performing repetitive tasks — which is the way most of the businesses operate, unfortunately. This is why DevOps engineers prefer working for cloud service providers like AWS, GCP or MS Azure, or at least work for Managed Services Providers like IT Svit, as they gain access to a wide variety of projects that way and can accomplish their goals. This is a win-win situation for both parties, as the DevOps experts train their skills and the IT outsourcing customers gain instant access to top-notch talents for their projects. - It’s hard to avoid vendor lock-in. Many businesses prefer to hire support engineers directly from cloud service providers, as who can know the system better than people that support it? They are able to quickly design, develop and deliver end-to-end cloud solutions, configure scalability and security features, build CI/CD pipelines and ensure rapid software delivery… yes. But this comes at a price of vendor lock-in, as AWS DevOps specialists will naturally use Amazon S3 for file storage, Amazon EC2 instances for running environments, Amazon CloudTrail for security, Amazon Fargate for managed Kubernetes clusters, etc.
This is good if you are sure you are with AWS for life (but nobody can be sure of this, really). There is a myriad of scenarios where a business might need to migrate from a public cloud to another cloud platform, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure or even on-prem cloud solutions like OpenStack or OpenShift. In this case, you would have to ditch all the infrastructure and build a new one from scratch at your new destination. In addition, many cloud services were designed to operate in bundles, but not all of the features would be needed for your particular project. Thus said, you risk overpaying for the suite of cloud computing tools you don’t actually require.
To avoid this, a business would need to understand what cloud infrastructure is actually needed for a custom software development or mobile app development, what open-source alternatives to cloud-based tools exist, and how to use them to build a modular and resilient cloud infrastructure that can be relatively easily moved to another cloud service provider. In other words, a business would need to have a decent DevOps expertise, and we are back to point one.
These are two main reasons why most of the companies nowadays are going for IT outsourcing of DevOps services and order cloud consulting from Managed Services Providers, like IT Svit. Cloud consulting companies understand the peculiarities and limitations of various cloud-based tools and have the needed understanding of the best practices of cloud infrastructure design and implementation. This way, the customers get instant access to skilled professionals and the latest technology, which ensures the successful accomplishment of their projects.
Cloud managed services for your business
IT Svit is a Managed Services Provider with 14+ years of experience in the remote system administration and 5+ years of DevOps expertise. Our team has an in-depth understanding of AWS and GCP cloud computing platforms and a decent knowledge of MS Azure specifics. We also have a profound knowledge of various open-source cloud-based DevOps tools like Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Ansible, ELK stack, Prometheus & Grafana, etc.
This expertise helps us design, implement and run cost-efficient cloud infrastructure for our customers, where only the essential cloud services are vendor-specific, and everything else is replaced with open-source analogs. This helps avoid vendor lock-in and ensures the customer receives a modular, easily adjustable system that provides reliable performance and streamlined software delivery pipelines.
We are always ready to provide cloud consulting services for your business, so if you need assistance with your next project — contact us and we will be glad to help!
