SRE & DevOps
Consulting Services
RisingStack is your webdev partner for the AI age.
SRE & DevOps
SRE Services
SRE is about achieving high availability without allocating an unnecessary amount of money and workforce to tackle the problem. SRE brings several principles and practices to realize this goal, but in our experience, most technology companies fall short of one of the most important ingredients: efficient communication between teams.
Our SRE consultants speak the language of both your DevOps / IT operations people and Software Developers, so they can help fill in the gaps. Since adopting SRE means that infrastructure-related problems become software development questions, they will also learn to communicate better with their product developer peers. RisingStack’s SRE consultants can also help you make the most of your current cloud provider by introducing you to new cloud services, state-of-the-art cloud-native technologies, data services, and data platforms.
Once you have that setup, you can start working on the actual SRE development: setting up your application and infrastructure to be properly observable; setting up proper incident response processes, and release procedures. These also open the way towards better capacity planning, so you can optimize your cloud strategy and related spendings. It makes it easier to decide whether you want to use self-hosted open source technologies or if it’s better to use managed services.
These practices can also make your product development cycles quicker and easier to plan, as our seasoned consultants can show you points for automation you never thought you needed.
What you get are happy users, happy engineers, and happy stakeholders.
DevOps Consulting Services
DevOps is a term for a group of concepts that, when combined, can help an organization rapidly produce software in a reliable manner. By automating and monitoring the process of software development and delivery, DevOps teams can speed up the production process while ensuring high-quality products.
Some of the most popular DevOps tools include Jenkins, Puppet, and Chef. These tools can help automate various aspects of the software development process, from code creation to testing and deployment. By using these tools, organizations can improve their efficiency and reliability, while reducing costs.
Adopting DevOps practices for product development and maintenance is becoming an industry standard. Your organization has probably already started adopting the DevOps philosophy if you are here. Maybe you have just got started on the way of digital transformation, or perhaps you already have SRE or DevOps teams that need to be scaled up? Or are you looking for outsourced DevOps engineers, or does your team need more training in current best practices.
Adopting the DevOps mentality is not an easy path, considering how often it means different things to different people even within the same organization.
We at RisingStack have been following DevOps methodologies since 2015 and have helped our clients implement them. According to our experience, adopting the necessary technologies can be quite challenging on its own.
For example, setting up a CI/CD pipeline for the first time and finding the right amount of automation for your organization is quite a challenge. Not enough automation can hinder progress, too much at the wrong place might get difficult to maintain.
- Moving to the cloud has its own challenges:
- Should you choose Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure or something else?
- What are the long-term ramifications of the choice?
- Should you choose to set up a Kubernetes cluster or use a PaaS solution instead?
- Can you migrate from one to the other if need be?
- How to handle secrets?
- Should you use products provided by your cloud platform or host open-source solutions yourself?
- Do machine learning-based models need to be served using a different infrastructure than a more conventional application?
- Where should you train your AI?
- How should data analytics be incorporated into your general software development processes?
After you’ve managed to find the answer to these questions, you’ll face the challenges of implementing the proper processes and best practices:
- How to properly handle code reviews?
- Should the infrastructure be checked into version control?
- Can you do DevOps and Agile together?
- Who should take part in sprint plannings and retros?
You might have already gotten lost in reading endless case studies yourself, but have not found the solutions that feels right. This usually happens because there are generic guidelines, but the devil is in the details and there is no one-size-fits all in implementing these solutions.
Our DevOps consultants can help you by assessing the current tooling, automations, infrastructure and observability of your system. Beyond that, we can aid your software development processes and provide you with strategies to ease the communication between developers and operations engineers.
To make sure you stay on the right track as you keep evolving your software, you can reach out to our DevOps consultants anytime – we are happy to help.
How We Can Help
Our SRE consultants can help you by assessing the current tooling, automation, infrastructure, and observability of your system to make sure they are in line with current best practices. A full audit usually takes one to two weeks.
With our SRE consulting services, we can assess your technological portfolio in terms of SRE, as well as your current processes and practices. We can also guide you in building out a completely new SRE team.
To make sure you stay on the right track as you keep evolving your software, you can book RisingStack’s consultants for a certain amount of hours/month as well, and reach out to them when their expertise is needed.
Cloud Technologies at RisingStack
Our team has several years of production experience with the following technologies:
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- ECS
- Docker Swarm
- Zipkin
- Jaeger
- Prometheus
- Kafka
- RabbitMQ
We’ll help you build it better and faster. Talk to an expert ->
Clients said about us:
"We’ve worked many times with Risingstack and we’ve achieved success every time. Their professional team has a very deep knowledge of Node.js and Kubernetes among many other technologies. Both consulting, developing and training sessions covered exactly what we needed, delivered on time. Experienced exceptional communication skills, flexibility and a customer-first mindset make them an awesome partner to work with."
Gabor Nadai
Head of Engineering at ingatlan.com
"RisingStack helped us to carry out an internal Kubernetes cluster audit for TIKI's Data Science Platform. Together, the mixed team was able to identify over 10 relevant topics and was able to solve most of them during the five day on-site engagement. After the intense work and exchange, the team was able to solve the remaining topics within next 8 weeks. At the present time DSP runs smoothly and there are no design or performance bottlenecks."
Reinis Vicups
CTO of Technologisches Institut für angewandte künstliche Intelligenz
"At Instructure we're building Canvas, the world's leading LMS system which is used by half of the world's top 50 Universities. We engaged 4 developers from RisingStack to build a critical core functionality in our distributed system. Besides delivering high-quality code, RisingStack helped us train new staff, carried out code-reviews and made suggestions on improving our infrastructure."
Marton Csikos
Director of Engineering, Canvas / Instructure
SRE Consulting in Practice
SRE is just as much about principles and practices as about technology, therefore every company has its own understanding of its meaning and how to implement it. Starting out as a full-stack JavaScript shop, our engineers got used to handling everything themselves, including tooling, setting up CI/CD pipelines, handling the infrastructure where their applications live, and its observability.
But deploying a service is only one part of the lifecycle. Developers need to make sure they are able to discover bottlenecks, bugs, security issues and make sure the application is highly available, which requires the use of proper Service Reliability Engineering and monitoring practices. Our engineers can consult you on these questions to help you iron out fragile aspects of the system, infrastructure and deployment pipeline.
Site Reliability Engineering for Monoliths and Microservices
When you have tens or thousands of services, it is near impossible to take care of deployments and configuration one by one. But strong SRE methods and the use of proper technologies and best practices is important for any system, not only for a microservices architecture. Automating change management and incorporating SRE principles into any workflow can help in providing a seamless experience to one’s users.
DevOps Reliability Engineering at RisingStack
Starting out as a full-stack JavaScript shop, our engineers got used to build everything themselves, including tooling, and setting up CI/CD pipelines. We can handle infrastructures just as well as applications – observability included.
Deploying a service is only one end of the life cycle: you need to make sure that the communication between software developers and operations engineers are efficient, and the processes aid both progress and stability. Our engineers can consult you on these questions to help you iron out information disparities between teams and make sure the right technologies and the proper practices are in use.
But why stop there? The true beauty of software engineering is that it’s an arrest-and-retrieval process. You can’t just deploy a service and call it good; you have to make sure all communication between teams are efficient, processes right for both progress or stability (depending on what your goal). Our team consults with clients like yours so they don’t get lost in this confusing world – we show them where their strengths lie when figuring out which technologies will work best based off information disparities between groups.
We’ll help you build it better and faster. Talk to an expert ->
Case studies & tutorials
Explore Real-World Applications and Learn Best Practices with RisingStack's In-Depth Guides
Argo CD Kubernetes Tutorial
With this Argo CD Kubernetes tutorial you'll learn to store credentials safely within you k8s cluster using a pull-based continous deployment tool.
How to Deploy a Ceph Storage to Bare Virtual Machines
The main drawback of a Ceph storage is that you have to host and manage it yourself. We'll show two different approaches of deploying Ceph.
Sometimes you do need Kubernetes! But how should you decide?
A case study where the adoption of Kubernetes has been heavily contested. Learn about our decision making process, and how we overcame k8s's limitations!
Got a project in mind?
Alternatively, you can reach us at LinkedIn or info (at) risingstack.com.