Hey everyone! I'm curious about how first level operations work for your teams. Do you outsource this part? If so, where do you get the service from and what exactly are they responsible for? I've heard about cloud environments with tons of nodes that require around-the-clock monitoring, alert management, and reporting. Do your teams handle onboarding new customers and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) provisioning internally, or is this outsourced as well? I'd love to hear how different teams handle these tasks based on the size of their infrastructure.
6 Answers
Outsourcing DevOps can be tricky if there isn't a solid connection between the service provider and your product team. If they’re just pushing tools without understanding your needs, it can lead to a lot of problems down the road. You might find that the focus shifts from building for the future to just completing immediate tasks.
Exactly! If they don't understand your processes, it becomes a black box when you need insights.
Absolutely! We outsource all our operations to Microsoft Azure. It’s been a game-changer for us!
From what I’ve seen, outsourcing 1st-level ops often leads to reactive management rather than proactive solutions. There’ve been cases where teams lose sight of their internal systems because the vendor is too focused on just closing alerts. Without someone taking ownership of developer experience, it really slows everything down, especially onboarding.
Yeah, we do outsource but the service hasn’t been great so far. They work on a junior level, managing basic operations and not much more. It's a bit limiting.
As someone who works with an outsourcing provider, we've deployed a few models for handling first-level ops. Sometimes we just monitor and be on call, but other times we handle operations directly according to client documentation while also picking up overflow support tasks. It’s a mix, but we’re still refining how to strike the right balance.
That sounds interesting! I’m curious though, how do you manage when developers have issues that don't align with your operations perspective?
Would love to hear how you’re adapting your strategy to fit different client needs.
In a previous role, we tried outsourcing our 1st-level ops, but we ran into major issues with vendors lacking context about our business. This led us to create better internal processes, plus we invested in automation to simplify our tasks. Some team members were contractors, but the leads were always in-house.
Totally agree! It's all about relationships and collaborative efforts; otherwise, you're just stuck with a reactive approach to issues instead of being proactive.