DevOps Conundrum?

Finding it hard to fill your DevOps vacancy?

Certain industry sectors haven’t really a need for utilising third party help when sourcing appropriate candidates. Whether it’s asking your existing team the question of ‘who do you know’ and pulling a shortlist of candidates together, or perhaps your name/brand serves you a steady stream of aspirational speculative applications that allow you to cherry pick the best talent whenever you need to.

But what if this approach limited your talent pool when needing to adopt new technologies?

Take the gaming industry for example. A very successful sector that by 2021 will be worth ￡5.2 billion in the UK (PwC). However in general terms the gaming industry has been slower to adopt a DevOps approach than other industries. What you then find is your existing talent pool doesn’t have the necessary skills to drive DevOps forward at the pace in line with business needs. Everybody is in the same boat – your team doesn’t know anyone suitable and the applications you receive aren’t technically skilled yet.

What are the options?

Invest a lot of time and support into your team to allow them to learn (and make mistakes) in order to become more agile, automate your infrastructure and successfully deploy beautiful code to your users/customers.

OR

Work with a third party managed service provider to either outsource DevOps entirely or use them to compliment your internal team.

Don’t get me wrong good/any (delete as appropriate) DevOps Engineers are hard to find in all industry sectors and making the right choice can bring real benefits to your business.

For those of you now on board with DevOps what were the barriers/hurdles? Are you experiencing any resistance within your organisation?

More importantly what benefits has it brought? I’d be really interested to learn more about the challenges you face on this topic. Please comment below.