What is DevOps as a service?

DevOps as a service means an external provider running build pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability and release processes on an ongoing basis rather than as a one-off engagement. It differs from a cloud consultancy in that the work is continuous: platform maintenance is a standing obligation rather than a project with a completion date.

What managed DevOps services cover at Azendo.

Scope and tooling are agreed before anyone starts. The work happens in your cloud account, under your policies, in your repositories.

Most partners buying managed DevOps have a pipeline that works and nobody who owns it. It was set up by someone who has since left, it breaks occasionally, and everyone routes around the breakage rather than fixing it.

Assigned engineers change that by being responsible for it continuously rather than reviewing it once. The difference shows up on a release day, not in an audit document.

  • CI/CD pipelines

    Build, test and deploy automation, with the quality gates agreed at scoping rather than added later.

  • Infrastructure as code

    Environments defined in Terraform so they can be rebuilt rather than repaired by hand.

  • Observability

    Metrics, logs and traces wired up so an incident is diagnosed from data rather than guesswork.

  • Release and rollback

    Staged deployments and a rollback path that has actually been tested.

  • Cloud cost control

    Someone watching the bill, which usually finds more savings in month one than the capacity costs.

Assigned to fit the stack you already run.

Pipelines: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, Bitbucket Pipelines. Infrastructure: Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible, Helm, Kubernetes, Docker. Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP. Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry.

Rebuilds get sold far more often than they are needed. We audit first and tell you honestly whether the pipeline needs replacing or repairing, and the second answer is more common than the first.

Cost is part of the remit rather than a separate engagement. A first review of an unmanaged cloud account usually finds more in savings than the capacity costs, which is worth knowing before you scope the work.

Infrastructure and provisioning
  • Terraform
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Ansible
  • Pulumi
  • + more on request
CI/CD
  • GitHub Actions
  • Jenkins
  • ArgoCD
  • CircleCI
  • Bitbucket Pipelines
  • + more on request
Cloud platforms
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Azure
  • DigitalOcean
  • Cloudflare
  • + more on request

What DevOps as a service costs per month.

Priced as committed monthly capacity rather than per incident or per project. We count the engineer's working hours across a year, subtract leave and public holidays, divide by twelve. The fee does not move in a heavy release month.

160 h
Typical monthly capacity for one DevOps engineer
Fixed
Monthly price, unaffected by leave or holidays
4–6 weeks
From signed scope to delivery starting
Monthly
Cycle to raise or lower committed hours

Building in-house, a local agency, or Azendo.

Hiring a DevOps engineer makes sense when the platform is permanent and the salary is justified. A consultancy suits a one-off audit or migration. Managed DevOps services sit between them, for infrastructure that needs running rather than reviewing.

ComparisonBuilding it in-houseLocal agencyAzendo
Time to productive outputMonths — recruit, onboard, ramp upFast to start, slow to learn your product4–6 weeks
Continuity of contextResets when someone leavesRebuilt with each new projectHeld by the same delivery team, for years
Continuity of product knowledgeLost when the hire leavesEnds with the projectHeld by the assigned team
Who answers for deliveryYou doAccount manager, between projectsA service delivery manager, continuously
Cost profileFixed, whatever the workloadPriced per projectOne monthly fee, adjustable each cycle
Scaling a disciplineA new hire each timeRe-scoped each engagementCapacity up or down at the monthly cycle

Questions about DevOps as a service.

What does DevOps as a service actually include?

Pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, release management and cost control, run by assigned engineers rather than delivered as a report. The scope is agreed before delivery starts.

How is this different from DevOps consulting?

A consultancy reviews your setup and recommends changes. Managed DevOps services means engineers assigned to build and run it, with an Azendo service delivery manager accountable for the outcome.

Do you work in our cloud account or yours?

Yours. Nothing moves to our infrastructure and nothing is subcontracted onward.

Can this be combined with development capacity?

Usually is. Development plus DevOps under one agreement is the most common combination we assign.

Who owns the infrastructure code?

You do, from the first commit, in your repositories under your licence.

A specialist rarely works alone on a roadmap. These disciplines cover the ground around the role and can be added to the same service agreement.

Managed DevOps for infrastructure that is already carrying traffic

Infrastructure work is unusual in that the better it is done, the less visible it becomes. That makes it easy to defer and expensive to defer for long. Managed DevOps is assigned to the platform continuously rather than mobilised when something breaks, which is the only arrangement under which the backlog of small things actually gets worked.

Where the constraint is reliability rather than deployment speed, a site reliability engineer is the right assignment. Where several product teams are waiting on the same pipeline, a platform engineer building internal tooling removes more delay than another set of hands on the queue.

Everything runs inside your own cloud account, under your own billing and your own IAM. We do not resell infrastructure and we do not hold your keys at an organisational level; the assigned specialist holds credentials, as your own engineer would.

Release confidence is usually a shared problem between platform and testing, so DevOps capacity is often assigned next to qa outsourcing on one agreement and one committed monthly capacity.

Tell us what cloud and devops capacity your roadmap needs.

Tell us about your project and the capacity you have in mind. A service delivery manager will get back to you.

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