Show HN: Elastic Byte – Managed DevOps and cloud infrastructure as a service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Elastic Byte – Managed DevOps and cloud infrastructure as a service

elasticbyte.net

17 pointsstroddie23 comments

From my understanding of DevOps, it's one of those things that is impossibly difficult to outsource, just like Product Management. On surface the output is merely specifications, and product sketches but there are plenty of things including foreseeing execution, customer development, and measurement that needs to be covered to add real value.

Can you really implement processes, see response of team towards them, enforce practices, monitor everything without being part of the team?

You bring up great points, and I think it really depends on the organization and how far along they are. Typically we like to focus on smaller companies (let's say handfuls of employees), heads down in product development. Usually for them, outsourcing infrastructure scale, uptime, performance, and security makes sense.

Second, we've found another good vertical are design and website agencies. Almost always they don't have anybody doing professional ops, yet they have contracts to build and host large websites with millions of pageviews a month. They tend to also be good fits.

Targeting small teams seems to be a good idea. I can concur that there are many teams for whom setting anything on servers can be an excruciating experience. But, in my opinion, your offering is too broad. When should a team call you? Should they rely completely on you to set their servers? Should they contact you when something gets broke? What happens when you are not around? What happens if you (in extremely unlikely scenario) 'rm -rf' some important stuff?

But best of luck with your venture!

That makes sense, I commented on similar earlier. Are you also getting the use case of an outsourced "on call" or companies in the "just launched a month ago" category? I would think these would also be good fits in addition to the smaller but established companies like you mentioned design shops etc.

How have you been generating leads? Word of mouth?

Congrats on your launch by the way. I wish you success.

I think you bring up some really good points. I think that DevOps is very team-centric and to some extent cross-team centric and removing that can make for an uneven environment.

I do think there are parts of it you can outsource such as first line on-call and I also think that DevOps as a service has a use case in a brand new start who maybe hasn't had time or needed to hire any DevOps personnel. But as a longer term play I think it runs contra to some of the ideas of DevOps.

So, contract work for running infrastructure? "Managed DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure As a Service" is a very buzzywordy and bloated way to describe that. It almost sounds like a parody.

Why not just: "We build and maintain IT infrastructure for your company"

Well, the general IT term include services like printers, faxes, office phone systems, WiFi, etc. I wanted to clarify we specifically focus on cloud infrastructure.

It's not "as a service", it's "as a contractor"

I actually intentionally structured and publically list pricing which is against what nearly every other consulting or enterprise sales company does. Pricing is uniform across all clients, and each client belongs to a given plan. I'd say our model fits a service more than traditional consulting.

On one hand I think price transparency is nice to see.

But on the other hand this really is a consulting business, they are tough to run, and there might be something important to learn from why consultants do not publicly list prices. The difference between feast or famine might be making sure to capitalize on one fat client in a quarter or even year.

If it helps you can think of it as a hybrid, something like "productized contracting". These folks are in the same space but use a different pricing structure:

https://www.rackaid.com/pricing/

It is an interesting business that I think lots of small and medium sized businesses would use. I've been exploring ideas for a more granular "productized contracting" offering myself.

Founder of Elastic Byte here. Happy to field any questions or feedback.

So, DevOps is as much about company culture, as tools / process.

How does DevOps as a Service plan on changing company culture?

I would guess a fair amount of your potential sales would be from organizations that want to move things to the cloud.

You might consider adding some information for potential clients looking for things like "AWS migration" or "Moving CI to the Cloud", etc.

That may also be at odds with your plans. That sort of activity usually has a big hump of hours up front that scales down when a migration is done. Your biggest plan is one person for a week out of a month.

Thanks for the feedback. Migrations to the cloud is indeed a vertical we see as in demand. I made a note to create a page dedicated to migrations on our site.

Seems you and I have similar business ideas. I've been thinking of doing this for http://slashdeploy.com. I wish you the best of luck. I'd love to stay in contact with you to talk business and potentially collaborate. Best of luck friend! My email is on my profile :)

Nice! That's exactly the same idea I had some time ago. Are you guys hiring?

Send me an e-mail (in profile).

So this is your extension of commando.io ?

Devops is not a role or team. It is a culture.

You can't outsource that.

The wrapping of your tagline (We build...) could use some work. Sometimes the words "Term" and "Contract" will be on the second line and sometimes on the third, it's super hard to read.

You're not really showing HN anything. Only one of your links at top of page work.

Reads simply as a contractor looking for clients and spamming HN.

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