Your infrastructure person just left — or your developers are keeping the servers alive on the side, and it is quietly slowing the whole team down. This page is about your choices. DevOps (the practice of automating how software is built, tested, and shipped) does not have to mean a full-time hire. Here is the honest comparison, in plain English.
Who owns your infrastructure now?
Jobin is a talented and experienced technologist, with deep experience in DevOps, Security, Compliance and Cloud Technologies. He has a very positive attitude, is collaborative and a pleasure to work with. We were very happy with project delivery, and I hope to keep working with him in the future.
Agentic AI Project · SOC 2 on AWS · United States
In plain English: SOC 2 (a widely recognised security and compliance audit) on AWS (Amazon's cloud platform, where your servers and databases run) means we delivered audited, compliant infrastructure for that client.
Two situations bring founders to a page like this. Both are common, and both are fixable. The worst move in either case is to freeze and hope it holds together.
One person knew where everything ran, how it got deployed, and what to do when it broke — and now they are leaving, or already gone. The scary part is not the empty desk; it is the knowledge walking out with them. Nobody left can safely answer “what happens if this goes down at 2am?” The clock is on to write down what only they knew before it is lost for good.
You never hired for operations, so your product engineers cover it between features. They are smart, but this is not their craft — so deployments are nerve-wracking, the cloud bill creeps up, and every incident pulls your best people off the roadmap. It works until it does not. Meanwhile the features customers are waiting for ship slower, because the people who should be building them are babysitting servers instead.
There is no single right answer — the right one depends on how much steady work there really is. Here is the plain-English trade-off for each, including where our own kind of offer is the wrong fit.
| Hire in-house | A freelancer | Fractional team (us) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best when | Infrastructure is a full-time job every single week and you can carry the salary. | You have one clear project with a start and a finish, not ongoing responsibility. | The work is real but part-time, and occasionally urgent at 3am. |
| What it costs | A senior DevOps hire typically costs £65k–95k in the UK, €70k–100k in the EU, or $120k–180k+ in the US per year in salary alone — before recruitment, tooling, on-call coverage, and the risk of a single point of failure. | Cheaper per hour, and easy to start. But you are buying hours, not accountability for whether the systems stay up. | Monthly retainers scale with account complexity and support depth; three tiers (see /cloudops/). We share full pricing on the first call. |
| Cover when someone is away | None — if your one hire is sick, on holiday, or quits, you are back to square one. That is the single point of failure (one person being the only thing keeping the systems running) showing up again. | None — a freelancer is also one person. If they vanish mid-project, the work and the context vanish with them. | Built in — several people share the work and the on-call (someone responsible for responding when systems break, day or night), so someone always knows your setup. |
| Range of skills | One person's strengths. Deep in some areas, thin in others — no single hire is expert in security, cost, and architecture at once. | Whatever that individual happens to know. Great if it matches your gap exactly; a problem if it does not. | A whole team's range — security, cost control, and cloud architecture — for a slice of the price of one specialist. |
| Time to get going | Slow. Hiring a good DevOps engineer takes months, and you are exposed the entire time you are searching. | Fast to start, but ramp-up depends on how much they document. Often little is written down. | Days, not months. We stabilise first, document as we go, and hand over cleanly whenever you want to bring it in-house. |
| The honest risk | Expensive, slow to hire, and you are betting a critical function on one person staying. | Cheap until they disappear. No continuity, no shared memory, no one to escalate to. | Not the right call if infrastructure is genuinely full-time in-house work. We will tell you when that is you. |
No big-bang, no risky switch-over. We take the weight off gradually, in an order designed to make things safer at every step — stabilise first, write it down second, improve third.
We get the right access the right way, take stock of what is actually running in your cloud (the servers and databases behind your product), and put out any fire that is already burning. By the end of the week, someone competent is watching the systems again.
We map how everything is deployed, where the important pieces live, and what to do when each one breaks. This is the knowledge your departing engineer was carrying in their head — now it lives in documents you own, not in one person's memory.
We put proper alerting in place so problems page a human before customers notice, and we take over the on-call rota (the schedule for who responds when systems break). Your developers stop being the emergency contact and get back to building product.
With the basics solid, we move to the useful work: making deployments calmer, trimming the cloud bill, and tightening security. This runs on a monthly retainer, and everything we build stays in your account so you are never trapped.
When you are trusting an outside team with the systems your business runs on, you should know exactly who is accountable. Here it is the founder — not a salesperson who hands you to strangers after you sign. The person who scopes your situation on the first call is the person responsible for it afterwards.
That does not mean one person does everything — a shared team handles the day-to-day so there is always cover. It means you are never more than a message away from someone who can make a decision and owns the outcome. The testimonial above came from exactly this kind of engagement: hands-on, collaborative, delivered.
Book time with the founder →You should be able to sanity-check the numbers before you pick up the phone. Here is the plain comparison — a full-time hire versus a monthly retainer with us.
A senior DevOps hire (someone who automates how your software is built, tested, and shipped) typically costs £65k–95k in the UK, €70k–100k in the EU, or $120k–180k+ in the US per year in salary alone — before recruitment, tooling, on-call coverage, and the risk of a single point of failure.
That last part matters: with one hire, if they are sick, on holiday, or they resign, your cover goes with them.
Monthly retainers scale with account complexity and support depth; three tiers (see /cloudops/). You buy a slice of a whole team's time and cover, rather than a single full-time salary.
For anything else cost-related — exactly which tier fits, what a project would run to — we share full pricing on the first call, once we understand what you actually need.
No invented numbers on this page. Real figures, in context, on the first call.
This page is written for founders. If you have engineers who want the detail — the actual practices, tools, and retainer structure — point them at these two.
Our DevOps on AWS page covers how we build and automate the pipeline that ships your software. Our CloudOps Retainer page lays out the ongoing operations tiers — monitoring, incident response, and on-call cover — that a handover settles into.
Plain answers to the questions we hear most when infrastructure suddenly has no owner. Yours not here? Ask it directly on a call.
Book a call →Whether your DevOps person just left, your developers are stretched thin covering it, or you are simply weighing up hiring versus a freelancer versus a team — start with a free call directly with the founder. We will tell you which option actually fits your situation, even when the honest answer is not us.
★ Founder on every call · Work stays in your account · No jargon, no lock-in
