DevOps engineers help businesses increase the speed of development processes, optimize infrastructure costs and performance, as well as create efficient delivery pipelines.
As the demand for DevOps experts is growing, many businesses find it challenging to find and hire DevOps engineers with the right expertise. Where should you look for DevOps specialists? And how to make sure that they have the expertise and experience you are looking for? Let's find out how to address all of these questions to hire the best DevOps engineers for your project.
Contents
- What is the best destination to find DevOps specialists?
- Which best practices you should use to hire DevOps engineers?
- How to hire DevOps engineers and win?
- How N-iX DevOps developers can help your business?
A closer look at Eastern Europe – the top destination to hire DevOps engineers
Eastern Europe is home to some of the most skilled tech experts in the world and is one of the most popular destinations for hiring the best DevOps engineers. A large talent pool and similar cultural mindset that enable effective communication make local service providers very appealing to western businesses. Let’s take a closer look at the top 3 countries where you can look for partners to help you hire the best DevOps developers.
Ukraine: the best destination for finding DevOps specialists
There are several aspects that make Ukraine such an attractive option to find technology partners that can provide experienced DevOps developers. First of all, it offers the second-largest DevOps talent pool in the region (9.6K) and the largest one that is actually available for outsourcing.
Secondly, the Ukrainian IT talent pool includes some of the most skilled engineers in the world. In fact, at the moment, local experts are ranked 5th in the world by TopCoder.
Finally, with IT outsourcing having a long history in Ukraine, finding a tech vendor that has years of experience is a lot easier than in many other countries. Forming partnerships with such companies always results in easier communication and more beneficial results. This is signified by the long list of leading global enterprises, such as Lebara, Fluke, and OfficeDepot, that turned to Ukrainian vendors for this exact reason.
Poland: a high number of experts with somewhat limited availability
Poland is home to the largest pool of engineers who are more than qualified to successfully implement any DevOps transformation strategy. Local DevOps developers are some of the best in the world, ranked 7th in the world by TopCoder.
However, a big portion of local experts (over 40%) is involved in BPO projects, making them unavailable for any outsourced tech partnerships. As a result, finding DevOps experts who can actually assist you with DevOps transformation may be a bit challenging.
Romania: a promising talent pool
Romania offers the third-largest pool of DevOps experts in the region. It has an emerging software outsourcing market, with many young companies eager to form new partnerships.
However, while there are many DevOps engineers in Romania, quite a few of them may be somewhat lacking tech experience. This becomes especially apparent on platforms that provide country rankings based on developer skills. Indeed, TopCoder, for example, ranks Romania as number 17 in the world – behind the other 2 destinations on this list. As a result, it may require more time to find experts with the right skillset and experience.
How to hire a DevOps engineer: top 4 best practices
DevOps transformation is a complicated process, and its success relies heavily on the tech partner that you choose. In addition to settling on the right location, there are other things that you need to keep in mind while choosing a tech partner that will provide you with DevOps engineers.
Identify your needs and set KPIs that you aim to achieve
Before any project, especially the one with a scale such as DevOps transformation, it is important to define areas that you aim to improve and the KPIs that you expect to achieve. When it comes to DevOps, these can be:
- Improving scalability. One of the biggest advantages DevOps engineers bring is their ability to quickly and efficiently scale your delivery infrastructure up or down.
- Optimizing costs. DevOps specialists can help you more efficiently distribute your expenses by automating delivery infrastructure, leveraging third-party services, and optimizing the use and costs of infrastructure resources.
- Enabling 24/7 support. DevOps can automate on-call solution assistance to enable 24/7 support and free up your engineers’ time.
- Migrating the infrastructure. DevOps engineers play an important role during infrastructure migration, be it from on-premise to the cloud, or cloud-to-cloud.
- Utilizing Big Data. DevOps engineers can help you optimize your data infrastructure for more efficient data collection, storage, and analysis.
Explore your partner’s portfolio
While evaluating a service provider for a potential partnership, special attention has to be paid to their portfolio. These can be found on the company’s website or platforms that provide verified reviews, such as Clutch.co or Goodfirms. A large number of highly-rated projects is the first criteria that signifies a reliable partner.
Learn about the DevOps services your partner provides
Another important detail that you need to assess about a potential partner is the list of services they provide. It is important to choose a partner that offers a wide range of DevOps services as you may require them during your transformation journey, even if you have no need for them now. These should include:
- Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC);
- Site reliability engineering;
- Delivery pipeline and Continuous Integration (CI/CD);
- Infrastructure automation, orchestration, stability;
- Infrastructure security;
- DDos, web attack, and intrusion detection and prevention;
- Incident management;
- Firewall as a service and hardware firewall;
- Configuration management;
- Monitoring, logging, and alerting.
Assess the expertise of DevOps experts
In addition to services, your partner must be able to provide you with skilled DevOps engineers who are proficient in the tools and technologies that you need. While these may vary depending on the specifics of your project, the following areas must be covered:
- Public and private clouds. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Digital Ocean.
- Infrastructure as a Code (IaC). AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager, Helm, PowerShell, Terraform.
- Automation and orchestration. Ansible, Bash, Chef, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, PowerShell, Puppet.
- CI/CD. AWS, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, CodeDeploy/CodePipeline, Jenkins Pipelines, TeamCity.
- Monitoring and logging. AWS CloudWatch, DataDog, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Kibana, Nagios, Prometheus, Splunk, Zabbix.
- Infrastructure security. AWS SG, AWS WAF, Azure Firewall and Application Gateway, Azure NSG, Cisco ASA, OSSEC, Snort, Suricata.
3 success stories of how businesses benefited from DevOps engineers
N-iX DevOps developers provided their expertise to help over 25 clients successfully deliver projects of varying complexity. The following projects show how DevOps engineers can help businesses achieve their goals.
DevOps as part of a large-scale digital transformation for Lebara
N-iX helped Lebara – one of Europe’s largest and fastest-growing telecom companies – undergo a large-scale digital transformation. Naturally, DevOps played an essential part in the digitization process, which was made more difficult by the fact that it had to be completed on a live product.
Our DevOps experts conducted a thorough audit of Lebara’s infrastructure and provided a detailed transformation plan. They introduced various automation tools and DevOps practices into the delivery pipeline that significantly boosted the speed of developing bug-free code and reduced the amount of required manual work to a minimum. As a result, Lebara now enjoys a much faster time-to-market of their new products.
DevOps Center of Excellence for a large wireless telecom service provider
N-iX set up a DevOps Center of Excellence for their client (under NDA) – a company that provides technology and business services for multinational wireless telecom enterprises.
Our experts helped perform an on-site assessment of the existing DevOps processes, optimize and standardize the CI/CD operations within the entire organization, and streamline the configuration and OS patching of the client’s solutions.
Our DevOps engineers supported the client’s digital transformation, helped enhance their high-load system that processes thousands of messages every second, and significantly increased their product’s scalability.
Infrastructure migration and automated CI/CD pipeline for Orbus
Orbus is a leading provider of software solutions that enhance application portfolio management, business process analysis, and enterprise architecture capabilities. The company had to rely heavily on an extensive manual QC team which slowed down their development processes.
N-iX provided experienced DevOps specialists who helped to migrate the client’s legacy on-premise infrastructure to Infrastructure as Code and implemented automated CI/CD processes into the delivery pipeline. This significantly increased the speed and reliability of development and helped Orbus optimize costs by decreasing their need for manual QC.
How N-iX DevOps developers can help your business?
- N-iX has a strong team of 25+ DevOps specialists who are experts at CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, cloud adoption, and other DevOps tool and techniques;
- We have significant experience in providing various tech services for leading global enterprises, having formed strategic partnerships with big names such as Lebara, Fluke, and OfficeDepot;
- N-iX makes sure that your data always stays protected by complying with all information security regulations, such as GDPR and ISO 27001:2013;
- The N-iX name has a constant presence on various top service provider lists from verified B2B review platforms such as Clutch.co and Goodfirms.
