DevOps Engineering for Teams Tired of 3am Pages

CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, and the operational runbooks your on-call rotation can actually follow. Founder-led DevOps consulting — we tell you straight when you do not need it.

When DevOps actually matters

The DevOps industry has spent ten years convincing engineering teams they need Kubernetes, a service mesh, and a six-person platform team. They mostly do not. Vercel, Fly.io, Render, and Railway handle the workload for the vast majority of small and mid-market software companies, and a junior engineer with a CI/CD template can usually take it from there.

Real DevOps engineering matters when your stack genuinely outgrows managed platforms — when you need multi-region traffic with custom routing, regulated workloads that demand specific cloud postures, per-tenant isolation, custom GPU or trading infrastructure, or hybrid cloud and on-prem deployments. It matters when your CI pipeline takes forty minutes and developers stop running it. It matters when your error tracking, logs, metrics, and traces all live in different SaaS tools and the on-call rotation cannot correlate them. That is when we get the call.

What we build

CI/CD pipelines on GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI with staged rollouts and automatic rollback
Infrastructure as code in Terraform or Pulumi — every cloud resource versioned, reviewable, and reproducible
Containerization with Docker and orchestration with Kubernetes, ECS, or Fly.io machines as appropriate
Observability — Sentry for errors, Grafana or DataDog for metrics, OpenTelemetry for tracing, structured logging
Database operations — Postgres tuning, automated backups, point-in-time recovery, read-replica patterns
Secret management with Doppler, AWS Secrets Manager, or HashiCorp Vault — no .env files in git
Multi-environment setup — dev, staging, preview-per-PR, and production with safe promotion paths
On-call runbooks, incident response playbooks, and the SLO and alerting setup that supports them
Cloud cost optimization — right-sizing, savings plans, idle resource cleanup, autoscaling policies
Security posture work — IAM, network segmentation, encryption, audit logging, and compliance prep

Our methodology

One-week audit first. We look at your current stack, talk to the people who get paged, and produce a one-page document that says either "do this DevOps work" or "your existing setup is fine, here are three small fixes." The audit is paid separately at $2,500 so you can decide whether to commit before we build anything.

From there, four- to twelve-week engagements depending on scope. We do not staff a dedicated platform team for you — we build the platform, document it, and hand it to your existing engineering team. Optional retainer for ongoing operations and incident support.

Process & timeline

Week 1: Audit — stack review, incident retro, on-call interview, one-page recommendation
Week 2-4: Foundations — CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure as code, secrets, observability baseline
Week 5-8: Production hardening — multi-environment, staged rollout, alerting, runbooks
Week 9-12: Optimization — cost work, performance tuning, security review, handoff
Optional retainer: monthly hours for incident response, on-call advisory, and platform upgrades

Tech & tools

GitHub Actions

Terraform + Pulumi

Docker + Kubernetes

AWS + GCP + Fly.io

Vercel + DigitalOcean

Sentry + DataDog

Grafana + Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Doppler + Vault

Backbone behind every cloud infrastructure engagement and every SaaS platform we ship. Hosted on your cloud accounts, in your name.

Reference engagements

Every production system we ship comes with the DevOps layer built in. A multi-strategy trading system runs 24/7 with zero unplanned outages because the CI/CD, monitoring, and alerting were treated as first-class deliverables. A motorcycle shop ops platform uses preview-per-PR environments so the client can review every change before merge. J5 Sales OS runs on a Terraform-managed footprint with full observability.

We dogfood the patterns we ship. The same CI/CD, observability, and incident response setup that runs our internal systems is what we deliver to clients — no experimental tooling paid for by your project.

DevOps engineering served from Macon, GA, with clients across Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, and beyond.

Pricing

Fixed-fee per scope. Typical ranges:

One-week DevOps audit with written recommendation: $2,500 flat
CI/CD pipeline + observability baseline for one application: $10k – $22k
Full IaC migration onto AWS or GCP with multi-environment + staged rollout: $25k – $55k
Kubernetes platform build with multi-tenant workloads and runbooks: $40k – $80k
Heroku, Vercel, or Render → AWS migration with parity testing: $18k – $45k

Optional monthly retainer at a flat hourly bank for incident response, on-call advisory, and continued platform work.

What you get

All infrastructure in Terraform or Pulumi in your GitHub repository
CI/CD pipelines documented and running on every merge
Observability stack with one dashboard and one paging path for on-call
Runbooks for the top ten operational scenarios your team will hit
Cost optimization report with right-sizing recommendations
Security posture review with prioritized remediation list
Handoff documentation so your engineers own the platform after we leave
Optional retainer for ongoing operations and incident support

FAQs

Vercel and Fly.io are fine for us — do we need real DevOps?

Often, no. We frequently advise teams to stay on Vercel or Fly.io and skip the Kubernetes migration. DevOps engineering is what you need when your stack outgrows managed platforms — multi-region traffic, custom hardware, regulated workloads, or per-environment isolation. We tell you straight on the first call.

Can you help us migrate from Heroku, Vercel, or Render to AWS or our own infrastructure?

Yes. Migrations off managed platforms onto AWS, GCP, or self-hosted Kubernetes are a common engagement. We containerize, write Terraform, build the CI/CD pipeline, set up observability, and run a side-by-side production parity check before cutover.

How do you handle observability — logs, metrics, tracing?

Sentry for errors, Grafana or DataDog for metrics, OpenTelemetry for distributed tracing, and structured JSON logs shipped to a queryable store. The on-call rotation gets one dashboard and one paging path, not seven SaaS tools fighting for attention.

What about CI/CD — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI?

Default to GitHub Actions because the developer experience is best and the cost model is predictable. GitLab CI when your org runs on GitLab. CircleCI when you have an existing investment. Every pipeline we ship runs tests, security scans, and a staged rollout — never a deploy-on-merge that bypasses verification.

Do we keep the infrastructure after you leave?

Completely. Everything is in Terraform or Pulumi in your repository. The cloud accounts are in your name. The runbooks are documented. There is no managed-service lock-in — you can hire any DevOps engineer to take it over.

DevOps & stack reading

All posts

Related services

Cloud Infrastructure

Docker, Nginx, CI/CD, and auto-scaling on DigitalOcean, Fly.io, Vercel.

SaaS Platform Development

Full SaaS builds where DevOps is part of the spec.

Penetration Testing

Red team validation of your hardened DevOps posture.

Background on our data-ownership philosophy: the custom CRM development guide. To scope DevOps work, contact us directly.

DevOps Engineering — Where We Serve

Georgia-based engineering team, working with clients across 14 US metros. Most DevOps work runs remotely with read-only cloud account access; in-person reviews available in Atlanta and the Southeast.

Stop fighting your deployments.

Call William Beltz directly at (770) 652-1282 or book a 20-minute scope call. We will tell you whether you need a real DevOps engagement or three small fixes you can ship next week.