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Are there contractors out there that will take on call shifts? Because it seems unlikely, and if your proposal is "put into a production a system that you will

Are there contractors out there that will take on call shifts? Because it seems unlikely, and if your proposal is "put into a production a system that you will have to spend $500/day every time it goes down and wait 2-4 business days for a resolution" then you're a braver person than I am.

onion2k 4y ago
Obviously not. You don't pay someone to just set it up. You pay to help do what you'd do if you had a dedicated devOps teams. You pay someone to set up the system with your team so they understand it, train your team to use it, write some documentation about it, script a rollback procedure, maybe help on developing playbooks, etc. Besides, there are people out there who offer on-call services for a small retainer.
- nprateem 4y ago
  This is optimistic to say the least. I've worked as an SRE for 5 years and apart from the others in the team the devs don't have nearly as much knowledge. There's no way I'd rely on them to fix an outage. And even on a small retainer you'd better hope they retained the knowledge of how all that stuff works if you're only calling on them every now and again.
  - mattbillenstein 4y ago
    The idea is devops as _culture_ - I come in as an expert and set it up, then show them how I did it, then run through various disaster recovery scenarios so they learn it and can handle the vast majority of problems. And you'd be surprised how little problems you might have - I've had many VMs with literally years of uptime running without issue. Most people focus on "devops" as a job - and they never bother to teach the rest of the team anything about how stuff works. Worse than that, modern clouds encourage you to build opaque and complicated systems which probably only someone working on them full-time has a hope to understand...
    - nprateem 4y ago
      If it was so easy for devs to pick up SRE companies wouldn't be struggling to find good people. Culture doesn't mean they'll know how to fix <some weird edge case> at 3am in the morning. The SRE with constant ops exposure is likely to have a much better chance, if only because they (ought to) really know how to debug it.
    - nightpool 4y ago
      > I've had many VMs with literally years of uptime running without issue. I hope they all have fully patched base libraries and kernels, security auditing is getting to a much more common requirement these days even among very small companies. For example, anybody using Facebook Login.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    And even on a small retainer you'd better hope they retained the knowledge of how all that stuff works if you're only calling on them every now and again. This is why we document things at the company I work for. If you're serious about a project and want it to exist for a long time there will be things that only come up every few years, and you won't remember them. You can either write things down or you have to relearn how things work every time. Wroting things down is much easier.

onion2k 4y ago

Obviously not. You don't pay someone to just set it up. You pay to help do what you'd do if you had a dedicated devOps teams. You pay someone to set up the system with your team so they understand it, train your team to use it, write some documentation about it, script a rollback procedure, maybe help on developing playbooks, etc. Besides, there are people out there who offer on-call services for a small retainer.

nprateem 4y ago
This is optimistic to say the least. I've worked as an SRE for 5 years and apart from the others in the team the devs don't have nearly as much knowledge. There's no way I'd rely on them to fix an outage. And even on a small retainer you'd better hope they retained the knowledge of how all that stuff works if you're only calling on them every now and again.
- mattbillenstein 4y ago
  The idea is devops as _culture_ - I come in as an expert and set it up, then show them how I did it, then run through various disaster recovery scenarios so they learn it and can handle the vast majority of problems. And you'd be surprised how little problems you might have - I've had many VMs with literally years of uptime running without issue. Most people focus on "devops" as a job - and they never bother to teach the rest of the team anything about how stuff works. Worse than that, modern clouds encourage you to build opaque and complicated systems which probably only someone working on them full-time has a hope to understand...
  - nprateem 4y ago
    If it was so easy for devs to pick up SRE companies wouldn't be struggling to find good people. Culture doesn't mean they'll know how to fix <some weird edge case> at 3am in the morning. The SRE with constant ops exposure is likely to have a much better chance, if only because they (ought to) really know how to debug it.
  - nightpool 4y ago
    > I've had many VMs with literally years of uptime running without issue. I hope they all have fully patched base libraries and kernels, security auditing is getting to a much more common requirement these days even among very small companies. For example, anybody using Facebook Login.
- onion2k 4y ago
  And even on a small retainer you'd better hope they retained the knowledge of how all that stuff works if you're only calling on them every now and again. This is why we document things at the company I work for. If you're serious about a project and want it to exist for a long time there will be things that only come up every few years, and you won't remember them. You can either write things down or you have to relearn how things work every time. Wroting things down is much easier.