DevOps-as-a-Service, also known as DaaS, is a service model that allows SaaS companies to leverage the power of DevOps practices without the need to build and manage their own DevOps team. It provides access to various tools, services, and expertise to support the development and operations teams, enabling them to automate and streamline the entire software development and deployment process.
What is DevOps-as-a-Service?
DevOps-as-a-service refers to a managed service model where SaaS companies leverage the expertise of specialized DevOps service providers to implement best-in-class DevOps methodologies on the cloud. Rather than investing time and resources in building extensive in-house DevOps teams, SaaS businesses can adopt DaaS from experienced providers to seamlessly execute end-to-end DevOps workflows.
DaaS providers like Neekan Consulting offer a breadth of DevOps products and services, including:
- Consulting on DevOps strategy, culture
- Integration of toolchains
- Design of CI/CD pipelines
- Cloud architecture design
- Infrastructure provisioning & automation
- 24×7 management of DevOps processes
Top Benefits of Adopting Managed DevOps-as-a-Service
Access to Complete DevOps Expertise
Implementing DevOps requires professionals with specialized skills across development, operations, automation, security and cloud management. Developing such comprehensive expertise in-house takes significant time and investment. With managed DaaS, SaaS companies gain access to deep DevOps expertise from the provider’s team of certified engineers. This breadth of knowledge helps optimize end-to-end DevOps processes.
Accelerated Deployment Velocity
Speed is critical for SaaS companies, and slow software deployments can be highly detrimental. To enable continuous delivery pipelines, DaaS providers leverage leading tools like Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Ansible. Configurations are automated, and new code is deployed in small batches, enabling continuous deployment. Tests are run early and often. This automation allows faster release cycles, improving deployment velocity by 70% or more.
Significant Cost Savings
Constructing full-stack internal DevOps teams requires substantial investment. The average DevOps engineer in the US costs over $140,000 per year. DaaS from managed service providers is far more cost-effective, saving over 30% compared to in-house DevOps teams. Service providers can offer reduced pricing through economies of scale in talent, tools, and cloud infrastructure. The money saved can be allocated towards fueling product innovation.
Focus on Core Offerings
When SaaS companies use DaaS, the provider fully manages mundane operations tasks. This allows the company’s developers and product teams to focus on delivering differentiated capabilities in their solutions. Their time is spent only on core product priorities rather than toiling on maintenance or plumbing tasks. The service provider’s DevOps engineers handle the continuous delivery pipeline, deployment automation, and cloud management.
Access to Cutting-Edge Technology
New DevOps tools and cloud technologies emerge constantly. Existing internal teams often struggle to stay updated with the latest advancements. Leading DaaS providers continuously evaluate and integrate cutting-edge solutions like Kubernetes, serverless platforms, and containers into their offerings. By leveraging DaaS, SaaS companies can adopt innovations like microservices, infrastructure-as-code, and CI/CD automation without having to reskill internal staff.
Increased Operational Agility
In-house DevOps teams can lack the agility to scale rapidly with fluctuating business needs. With managed DaaS, SaaS companies can use only the specific DevOps services and expertise needed for their current stage and pay per usage. When workloads increase, they can seamlessly scale up DaaS capabilities and scale back down just as quickly when demands stabilize. This level of agility is difficult to achieve with an internal headcount.
Boosting Innovation Velocity
By fully leveraging DaaS, SaaS companies can significantly optimize development cycles to boost innovation velocity. DaaS providers streamline workflows across development, testing, infrastructure, and security. Automation and collaboration across the end-to-end toolchain accelerate cycle times. Code is written, tested and deployed faster. Bugs are identified and fixed quickly. New feature release frequency increases. This acceleration of software delivery fuels product innovation.
Evolution to Cloud-Native Architectures
Transitioning legacy monoliths to cloud-native architectures requires deep expertise in microservices, APIs, automation, and infrastructure-as-code techniques. Highly skilled DaaS providers have tremendous experience helping SaaS companies successfully undertake this shift to the cloud. This enables building and running modern, agile software on cloud platforms like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Higher Levels of DevOps Maturity
Measuring DevOps maturity with frameworks like DORA is vital for SaaS companies to quantify improvements. Leading DaaS providers utilize detailed benchmarking across various dimensions like collaboration, automation, and delivery performance. These DevOps metrics and the associated insights help systematically increase maturity across people, processes, and technology.
Improved Security Posture
Robust security is crucial for SaaS businesses. Implementing best practices for secure software development, infrastructure security, and secrets management requires significant effort. DaaS providers incorporate security capabilities deeply into their offerings, improving security posture substantially for clients.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
By adopting DaaS, SaaS companies can achieve faster time-to-market for new capabilities, higher quality through early bug detection, improved system stability via automation, and faster resolution of issues. All this directly translates to higher satisfaction levels for end customers.
Scalable Capacity
SaaS business workloads often fluctuate significantly. DaaS allows seamlessly scaling up and down development, operations and infrastructure capacity based on demand. In-house resources lack this fluidity to scale elastically.
Key Consideration for Adopting Managed DevOps
SaaS companies should look for these key capabilities when evaluating DevOps-as-a-service providers:
Proven Experience with SaaS Companies
Look for providers with vast experience guiding SaaS clients across the DevOps journey with concrete case studies and credentials.
Multi-Cloud Expertise
Providers should have expertise across cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI to enable flexibility. Assess experience with cloud-agnostic techniques using containers, Kubernetes, and Terraform, to name a few.
End-to-End Capabilities
Evaluate providers on the breadth of services offered – from consulting to managed services for CI/CD, 24×7 operations, monitoring, and governance.
Modern Tooling and Automation
The provider should leverage leading tools for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, testing automation, and monitoring rather than outdated tooling.
Diverse Talent Pool
Assess the variety and depth of the provider’s talent pool across development, operations, security, and automation. Look for relevant certifications.
Security and Compliance Posture
Review the provider’s security practices, compliance with regulations, protection of IP, and encryption standards to ensure robustness.
Flexible Engagement Models
Providers should offer choices in scoping engagements from partial services to complete managed solutions to work with client preferences.
Different DevOps Outsourcing Service Models :
- Hire DevOps Engineers: This is for businesses looking to augment their existing team with specific skill sets. The company can hire one or two DevOps engineers from the service provider to handle complex projects of your company.
- Hire a Dedicated Team: A holistic approach. The outsourced DevOps service provider provides a dedicated team to oversee and manage all DevOps requirements. They exclusively work on your project.
- Managed Service Model: Think of this as DevOps-as-a-Service. The external team completely manages the DevOps lifecycle.
- Hire DevOps Consultants: Ideal for businesses seeking insights, strategy optimization, and process overhauls without ongoing engagements. This model helps you to hire a DevOps consultant to plan a layout for DevOps implementation. When considering outsourcing DevOps, it’s essential to select the right model, which Neekan Consulting can guide you on.
Customer Success Metrics
For transparency, look for proven customer success metrics related to satisfaction, time-to-market, cost savings, release frequency, and innovation velocity.
By considering the above aspects and evaluating service providers thoroughly, SaaS companies can adopt DevOps-as-a-Service to maximize value.
Is the Time Right for You to Embrace Daas?
How can SaaS companies determine if the time is ripe for them to adopt DevOps-as-a-Service? Some key signals include:
- Inconsistent release processes – Manual, brittle release practices leading to unpredictable outcomes
- Lack of complete expertise – Gaps in DevOps skills across automation, cloud, and release management
- Slow time-to-market – Feature/fix release cycles take too long to meet business needs
- Challenges scaling capacity – Inability to scale engineers and infrastructure effectively due to siloed teams/processes
- Poor uptime – Reliability issues are common, hurting customer experience and brand reputation
- Focus lost to operations – Too much time spent on maintenance rather than product innovation
- Security is an afterthought – Minimal attention to security, compliance and risk management
- Low maturity – No framework in place to measure and improve DevOps performance
Daas Case Study: Healthcare Saas Company
Neekan helped a healthcare SaaS company adopt DaaS to optimize its cloud deployment architecture and CI/CD pipeline.
Problem Statement:
The customer needed more configuration management best practices, resulting in delays in meeting release commitments and needed a cloud architecture.
Neekan’s Solution:
- Analyzed product and designed a scalable AWS cloud deployment architecture
- Setup cloud environment with infra for security, scalability, monitoring and backup
- Designed and implemented automated CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes
- Enabled monitoring via CloudWatch to ensure availability
Outcomes:
- 70% faster time-to-market through rapid continuous delivery
- Improved stability and availability
- Enhanced configuration management
- Quicker delivery of capabilities to customers
- Greater focus on core product innovation
Conclusion
Software is crucial for SaaS companies in this digital era to meet customer needs and drive growth. Adopting DevOps is vital to achieve speed, quality and consistency in software delivery. However, implementing modern DevOps practices requires extensive skills and experience across people, processes and technology. By leveraging DevOps-as-a-service from the right provider, SaaS companies can optimize their software development lifecycle and gain a competitive advantage without significant in-house DevOps investments. The access to expertise, automation, accelerated release cycles, cost savings, risk reduction and other benefits make DaaS a compelling model. SaaS companies that thoughtfully embrace DaaS can transform their velocity and agility and refocus their efforts on product innovation that delights customers.
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