[moksly]

I’m curious as to what you’re maintaining. Once we set our pipeline up with a consultant agency and build step-by-step guides on how to launch a docker container through it, the maintenance of the pipeline has required no human hands.

This is in an enterprise sized organisation with 10.000 employees.

We still have a sys ops team to handle security, network and all those other things, but deploying software? That’s really easy for our developers.

We use Azure DevOps, we deploy to Azure apps with a dev, testing, staging (5% traffic) and prod (95% traffic) slots. It takes maybe 5 minutes to go through the to-do-list when a new application or function or whatever is created and we have a very fascist naming convention. This isn’t an azure commercial, we’re only in azure because we’re the public sector and already so in bed with Microsoft that it’s the cheapest solution. I’m sure you could do the same in any other cloud.

[ckdarby]

This is partially correct and honestly if your consulting agency wasn't upfront about this they're overcharging the business either today or down the road when the business comes back needing more.

Good service is ones that solve the problem in a reasonable time. Great services accomplish the same as good service but understand that the code, company and even the pipeline will evolve and either the client will need to reinvest themselves or externally again. They will communicate this with the limitations to the client.

There are only two types of clients I've seen more inline with the original statement, declining or flat company and both are only in the maintenance do not touch phase.

[moksly]

I’m not sure what the issue with hiring them back is. We spend around 5% of a full time employee for their services, we can hire them back another 19 times this year, 39 times by next year and so on.

Nothing they build us would last forever, but then, we operate 300 IT systems, only a few major systems have a life cycle of more than 5 years. 5 years ago everything we ran was on prem but on VMs on rented hardware, 10 years ago it was physically on prem some on physical servers, now it’s in azure, who knows where it’ll be in another 5 years.

I fail to see what a full time staffed devops department would give us except for added continuous cost that is so much higher than its alternatives that it’s just ridiculous.

I mean, I understand full well that system operators are worried in the current climate, but most of ours simply developed into broader roles that aren’t becoming obsolete.