DevOps
Shipping should be boring. Incidents should be rare.
DevOps is one of those areas where teams don't know they have a problem until something breaks in production at the worst possible time. If your deployment process involves manual steps, if you've had an outage that took hours to diagnose, or if staging doesn't actually resemble production — those are the warning signs.
What this involves
CI/CD your team will actually use
Pipelines that run tests, catch obvious problems, and deploy without manual intervention. Fast enough that nobody starts looking for ways to skip them. We set these up in GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or whatever you're already using — and we build in the checks that matter without making every pipeline a 20-minute wait.
Docker and Kubernetes when you need them
Containers for consistency between local dev and production — so "it works on my machine" stops being an explanation. Kubernetes for teams that have grown to the point where they actually need it. We're honest about when Kubernetes is the right answer and when it's complexity you'd be introducing for its own sake.
Infrastructure as code
Terraform or Pulumi so your infrastructure is version-controlled, reviewable, and reproducible. No more "what exactly is running in production?" and no more infrastructure that exists only in one person's head. When that person goes on holiday or leaves, the knowledge doesn't go with them.
Observability that helps you sleep
Logging, metrics, and alerting that tells you something is wrong before a customer does. Dashboards that show you what's actually happening. Incident response runbooks so that when something goes wrong at 2am, anyone on the team can handle it — not just the person who originally set it up.
This is a good fit if…
- Your deployments are manual, slow, or stressful enough that people avoid doing them
- You've had a production incident that took too long to diagnose or required someone specific to fix
- Your local dev environment and production behave differently in ways that cause bugs
- You're scaling and the infrastructure that worked at 100 users is struggling at 10,000
- You have no visibility into what's actually happening in your production environment
Technologies we use
We work in the stack you already have. Here's what we typically reach for in this area.
Common questions
What CI/CD tools do you use?
GitHub Actions for most projects — it's mature, widely used, and integrates everywhere. GitLab CI if you're already on GitLab. We'll use what you have rather than introduce new tooling for its own sake.
When does a team actually need Kubernetes?
When you're running multiple services that need to scale independently and have enough traffic that orchestration benefits outweigh complexity. For most early-stage products, it's too early and the operational overhead isn't worth it.
How long does a DevOps setup take?
A basic CI/CD pipeline with staging and production environments, Docker, and monitoring can be done in 1–2 weeks. Infrastructure-as-code migration and Kubernetes setup is typically 4–8 weeks depending on what's already in place.
Can you fix our existing pipelines rather than rebuild them?
Usually yes. We'd rather improve what you have than rebuild for the sake of it. We'll assess what's there and tell you what's worth fixing versus what would be faster to replace.