Our Cases
DevOps consulting services from IT Svit
Many businesses understand the need to implement DevOps best practices in their daily operations. Why so? Because DevOps services are much more than a combination of Dev and Ops and offer a new level of efficiency for IT operations and software development. However, to reach this level the business must understand that simply putting developers and Ops engineers in a single room to work does not make the DevOps magic happen.
IT Svit provides DevOps consulting services for nearly 5 years now. We have been a provider of remote system administration services for nearly a decade prior to discovering the benefits of DevOps and adopting it as the backbone of our workflows. Now we help our customers benefit from this technology by providing dedicated DevOps teams and quite successful DevOps consulting services.
How does it work then?
- IT Svit assesses the existing IT infrastructure. We communicate with business stakeholders and IT staff in place to create a detailed description of the systems, tools and workflows in place.
- We analyze the scheme of infrastructure used, the existing bottlenecks and the room for improvement available. We also propose the adjustments that will remove the bottlenecks and utilize all the potential of your infrastructure.
- If the existing infrastructure has to be moved to the cloud, sometimes it’s better to rebuild it from scratch to avoid dragging old problems with you to the new hosting platform. This will allow using all the benefits of the cloud (scalability, high-availability, containerization) and avoiding the limitations of traditional hardware servers.
- If you already have the cloud infrastructure in place you might come to realize it is not implemented in the most cost-efficient way. In this case, IT Svit provides full-fledged cloud migration and infrastructure optimization services that result in robust, transparent and well-thought-out cloud-agnostic solutions.
- Sometimes the businesses are quite satisfied with their cloud infrastructure performance, yet want to utilize their machine-generated data more efficiently. In such cases, IT Svit can offer our vast expertize with building cloud logging and monitoring solutions, which ensure efficient alerting and detailed information on the issues. This leads to greatly increased efficiency of operations, shorter issue resolution time and lays the basis for building self-healing infrastructure.
- Infrastructure management is another area where DevOps consulting can be of use. We utilize our experience with building Machine Learning models to deploy Artificial Intelligence algorithms for automation of infrastructure management. This way we ensure the ML model learns the normal patterns of operations and helps Ops engineers detect faster if an anomaly occurs.
- The next level of DevOps consulting allows the building of a self-healing IT infrastructure. This means that the ML models not only monitor the system performance but also apply the predefined issue resolution scenarios to deal with fluctuations. This reduces the amount of human effort required to maintain the system, so your IT team can dedicate their efforts to improving the infrastructure instead of simply keeping it running.
- DevOps methodology provides a huge boost to application development too. When all the software environments you need are codified in Terraform manifests and can be provisioned through a single command using high-performing Kubernetes clusters and Jenkins Pipelines. This way the developers can build, test and deploy new code without having ever to request anything from Ops and wait for a couple of hours for it to be done.
- Teaching the businesses to work according to DevOps best practices and use open-source DevOps tools is quite a frequent request for DevOps consulting services. This is best done through establishing the Centers of Expertise, either on-site or through the means of remote communication. like Skype or Google Hangouts. Our DevOps engineers help your IT Staff understand the logic of DevOps operations and perform IT operations according to 3 main DevOps principles:
- Infrastructure as Code — describing the required infrastructure states through configurable Terraform manifests that are stored in the Version Control System like GitHub and are versioned by your team to cover all the use cases
- Continuous Integration — organizing the code development workflows in such a way that the code is built in small chunks and project branches are frequently integrated into the main project trunk. This approach ensures code consistency and helps avoid major bugs making it to production.
- Continuous Delivery — the second part of the CI/CD pair, the methodology of building continuous delivery pipelines, when every code commit becomes a release with 1 command. Jenkins and Ansible are used to perform various sequenced operations so that the automated unit tests are started with one command and new code batches are delivered to the staging and production environments automatically, through rolling updates. The same logic helps manage the scaling, load balancing, security, backup&restores of the production servers.
By working together on your project or accomplishing a minor pilot by your team IT Svit DevOps engineers can teach how to apply these 3 principles in practice.
- Based on our experience, in order to be efficient, the DevOps team has to have certain roles, like DevOps visionary, Cloud Architect/System Reliability Engineer, Release Manager, DevSecOps, Dev+ engineer, Ops+engineer. Not all of them are needed for startups or small-to-medium enterprises, of course, and an experienced DevOps engineer can assume any of these roles. But in order to perform efficiently in these roles, people must understand the responsibilities involved and have the skills required.
This is essentially what the DevOps consulting is all about — helping your IT staff accomplish your project and possibly teaching them to become DevOps engineers themselves in the process.