
Show HN: Elastic Byte – Managed DevOps and cloud infrastructure as a service - stroddie
https://elasticbyte.net
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shubhamjain
From my understanding of DevOps, it's one of those things that is impossibly
difficult to outsource, just like Product Management. On surface the output is
merely specifications, and product sketches but there are plenty of things
including foreseeing execution, customer development, and measurement that
needs to be covered to add real value.

Can you really implement processes, see response of team towards them, enforce
practices, monitor everything without being part of the team?

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nodesocket
You bring up great points, and I think it really depends on the organization
and how far along they are. Typically we like to focus on smaller companies
(let's say handfuls of employees), heads down in product development. Usually
for them, outsourcing infrastructure scale, uptime, performance, and security
makes sense.

Second, we've found another good vertical are design and website agencies.
Almost always they don't have anybody doing professional ops, yet they have
contracts to build and host large websites with millions of pageviews a month.
They tend to also be good fits.

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shubhamjain
Targeting small teams seems to be a good idea. I can concur that there are
many teams for whom setting anything on servers can be an excruciating
experience. But, in my opinion, your offering is too broad. When should a team
call you? Should they rely completely on you to set their servers? Should they
contact you when something gets broke? What happens when you are not around?
What happens if you (in extremely unlikely scenario) 'rm -rf' some important
stuff?

But best of luck with your venture!

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arianvanp
So, contract work for running infrastructure? "Managed DevOps and Cloud
Infrastructure As a Service" is a very buzzywordy and bloated way to describe
that. It almost sounds like a parody.

Why not just: "We build and maintain IT infrastructure for your company"

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nodesocket
Well, the general IT term include services like printers, faxes, office phone
systems, WiFi, etc. I wanted to clarify we specifically focus on cloud
infrastructure.

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ddorian43
It's not "as a service", it's "as a contractor"

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nodesocket
I actually intentionally structured and publically list pricing which is
against what nearly every other consulting or enterprise sales company does.
Pricing is uniform across all clients, and each client belongs to a given
plan. I'd say our model fits a service more than traditional consulting.

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wc-
On one hand I think price transparency is nice to see.

But on the other hand this really is a consulting business, they are tough to
run, and there might be something important to learn from why consultants do
not publicly list prices. The difference between feast or famine might be
making sure to capitalize on one fat client in a quarter or even year.

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nodesocket
Founder of Elastic Byte here. Happy to field any questions or feedback.

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tyingq
I would guess a fair amount of your potential sales would be from
organizations that want to move things to the cloud.

You might consider adding some information for potential clients looking for
things like "AWS migration" or "Moving CI to the Cloud", etc.

That may also be at odds with your plans. That sort of activity usually has a
big hump of hours up front that scales down when a migration is done. Your
biggest plan is one person for a week out of a month.

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nodesocket
Thanks for the feedback. Migrations to the cloud is indeed a vertical we see
as in demand. I made a note to create a page dedicated to migrations on our
site.

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joneholland
Devops is not a role or team. It is a culture.

You can't outsource that.

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SteveNuts
The wrapping of your tagline (We build...) could use some work. Sometimes the
words "Term" and "Contract" will be on the second line and sometimes on the
third, it's super hard to read.

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jtreminio
You're not really showing HN anything. Only one of your links at top of page
work.

Reads simply as a contractor looking for clients and spamming HN.

