The infrastructure-as-a-service company can help your business succeed!
Running the cloud infrastructure is one of the essential components of success for a modern business with customer-facing online web and mobile products. However, using the cloud-based key features with utmost efficiency is quite hard without rich expertise in such a task. Unfortunately, this expertise is not readily available on the market, as all the software engineers with such knowledge are already employed with either:
- cloud computing vendors like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud, etc;
- large enterprises that offer fat cheques for providing digital transformation for their legacy systems, or
- Managed Services Providers, who are IaaS companies specializing in delivering DevOps Services to startups and small-to-medium businesses from various industries.
This is not, in any case, a statement that new DevOps talents cannot be obtained. Every company can hire an aspiring software engineer and pay for their training and certification with web services from AWS or Google Compute Engine, etc. However, this requires a significant amount of time and money — and both of these are luxuries for a fledgling startup. Thus said, opting for third-party assistance for building cost-effective public cloud infrastructure is the best decision a startup can make from a strategic perspective.
Why not opt for managed services from the IaaS providers then? There are 2 major reasons: being lean and avoiding vendor lock-in. Every cloud service provider tries to deliver an end-to-end solution so that all your needs are catered to — from storage and networking to CI/CD, cloud monitoring, security, serverless computing, Big Data analytics and Machine Learning.
However, while all of these services are designed to form a holistic system, they all cost money, and not all of them are really required to run an early-stage cloud startup infrastructure. Therefore, in order to stay lean and efficient, you must understand what services are essential, and which are not.
In addition, when all your mission-critical systems are built using proprietary cloud services, a transition to another cloud is close to impossible, as everything needs to be built back from scratch. On the other hand, using open-source cloud tools like Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker and Jenkins ensures your infrastructure will run equally well on any public or private cloud.
Thus said, why do we think that working with a Managed Services Provider like IT Svit will be a good decision for your business? Because through more than a decade of experience with server administration and over 5 years of working using DevOps best practices we came to understand the motives of both startups and software engineers, what makes them tick and how to combine them to ensure the best outcomes.
Why hire a third-party IaaS company?
Startups are driven by ideas, they want to earn money, but want to make the world a better place, too. They need to build great products and do it in the most cost-efficient way as they have limited budgets in the beginning. Thus said, they need access to top-notch specialists.
DevOps engineers, on the other hand, value the opportunities to grow their skills more than fat paychecks. Once their material requests are satisfied, they are driven by the desire to try out something new, master better DevOps tools, use the latest cloud technology available, build ever-better systems, configure self-healing cloud infrastructures monitored by AI and adjusted on the go using predictive analytics, etc. This is impossible when you work for years at a large enterprise with legacy infrastructure, long projects and rigid requirements that limit creativity.
Quite the opposite, working with startups means the projects are much shorter to implement and are not hindered by legacy infrastructure limitations. The DevOps engineers are free to explore the latest stable versions of open-source cloud tools and create unique, elegant, cost-efficient, scalable and resilient solutions. The key word here is unique, as there is a huge variety of projects for the picking, so the talents get ample opportunities to learn something new and improve. Thus said, both parties work in synergy and get the desired partnership outcomes.
What do Infrastructure-as-a-Service companies do?
For example, this is what a standard workflow for an IaaS company looks like:
- Project requirements evaluation. The Project Manager and the cloud architect discuss with the customer stakeholders all the aspects of the project at hand. This helps understand what a customer WANTS to get and what MUST be done in order to enable the required functionality.
- Defining the scope of work and building the solution roadmap. The IaaS provider specifies the time frames and milestones to deliver the required functionality and services. Project management, communication and reporting channels are also discussed and established at this stage.
- Deploying the pilot project. Before delivering the whole infrastructure, the team performs some auxiliary task to check if their work meets the customer’s expectations.
- Adjusting the workflows based on the pilot outcomes. The outcomes of the pilot project can highlight some challenges or inconsistencies in the original plan. After these are corrected, the parties can commit to the main project in earnest.
- Infrastructure design and implementation. The IaaS company designs and implements the cloud-based infrastructure required for your project, using as much open-source cloud tools and services as possible (Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins, etc)
- Management and optimization of the existing infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is provisioned, it is important to manage it cost-efficiently and update easily, should the need arise. This is why the infrastructure must be modular from the start, so the ongoing updates require minimal effort. In this is done, the systems can be scaled up and down and components can be added or retracted with ease.
- Adding new key features as the infrastructure grows. From installing the operating systems on your first cloud-based virtual machines to configuring Terraform states and Kubernetes clusters, establishing Jenkins CI/CD pipelines and ELK stack / Prometheus & Grafana cloud monitoring solutions to configuring Big Data analytics and Machine Learning models for real-time business analytics and building self-healing infrastructure.
The best part of this approach is that IaaS companies have to deal with lots of similar requests, so they have ready patterns and even ready solutions available for your project if they have accomplished such tasks before. And we assure you, that while each startup is unique, the infrastructures they run are quite similar, once you’ve configured them for several hundred times like IT Svit did.
Benefits of employing IaaS software companies
To wrap it up, outsourcing the cloud IT infrastructure management to a reliable IaaS software company like IT Svit helps save a ton on recruitment of an internal DevOps team and grants instant access to highly-skilled and motivated professionals. In turn, this makes ready-made solutions available, the solutions obtained over several hundreds of similar projects.
IT Svit is a reputable IaaS software company, one of the top-rated agencies on Upwork, listed among top 10 Managed Services Provides worldwide and the leaders of IT outsourcing market in Ukraine for the last 3 years. We have ample experience with managing IT infrastructure for our clients and will be happy to help your company design, implement and manage cloud-based IT infrastructure.
