Question 1

How do engagements start?

Accepted Answer

Every engagement starts with the free 30-minute audit. We review your setup, find the top issues, and deliver a written report within 24 hours. From there, if there is a clear project, we write a proposal with scope, timeline, and fixed price.

Question 2

Do you work with teams that already have some DevOps in place?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and this is the most common situation. Most clients have a partial setup — a pipeline that mostly works, a Kubernetes cluster that is not fully configured, or monitoring that does not alert on the right things. We work with what exists and improve it, rather than replacing everything.

Question 3

What cloud providers do you work with?

Accepted Answer

AWS (most common), GCP, and Azure. We work with your existing cloud provider. The only time we recommend migration is when the cost of staying on your current provider clearly outweighs the cost of moving — which is rarely the case.

Question 4

How do you handle knowledge transfer?

Accepted Answer

Everything we build is documented as we go. By the end of an engagement, your team has runbooks, architecture diagrams, and annotated Terraform and Kubernetes configs. We also do a handoff call to walk through anything your team wants explained.

Question 5

What does the retainer actually cover day to day?

Accepted Answer

Daily monitoring, incident response during business hours (24/5 for critical production incidents), weekly Friday async update, monthly cloud cost review, pipeline maintenance, Kubernetes upgrades, and a Slack channel your engineers can use to ask DevOps questions.

Question 6

How long does it take to set up a CI/CD pipeline?

Accepted Answer

For a single application with a clear scope — containerization, pipeline, and deployment — 1–2 weeks. For multi-service architectures or projects that include Kubernetes migration, 3–6 weeks. We scope it precisely before starting.

Question 7

We are on Jenkins. Should we migrate?

Accepted Answer

Not automatically. Jenkins is not the problem in most cases — configuration complexity and lack of maintenance are. If your Jenkins setup is working and your team knows it, we will work with it. If it is causing more problems than it solves, migration to GitHub Actions or GitLab CI is straightforward and usually worth doing.

Question 8

What is the difference between CI and CD?

Accepted Answer

CI (continuous integration) is the part that runs automatically on every code push: run tests, build the artifact, check for vulnerabilities. CD (continuous delivery or deployment) is the part that takes that artifact and gets it into an environment — staging, then production. Most teams have CI but are missing the CD part, which is where manual steps and human error live.

Question 9

Do we actually need Kubernetes?

Accepted Answer

Not always. If you are running a single application with straightforward scaling requirements, ECS, Cloud Run, or Fly.io may be simpler and cheaper. Kubernetes makes sense when you have multiple services that need independent scaling, you need fine-grained resource control, or your team has the capacity to operate it. We will tell you honestly if Kubernetes is overkill for your situation.

Question 10

How much does a managed Kubernetes cluster cost on AWS?

Accepted Answer

The EKS control plane is $0.10/hour (~$73/month). The real cost is the EC2 nodes. A small production cluster with 3 nodes (m5.large) costs roughly $200–$300/month. With Spot instances and Karpenter, you can reduce node costs by 60–70%.

Question 11

What is GitOps and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

GitOps means your desired cluster state is declared in a Git repository, and a controller (ArgoCD or Flux) continuously reconciles the actual state with what is in Git. The benefit: every change to your infrastructure goes through a pull request, is reviewable, is auditable, and can be rolled back by reverting a commit.

Question 12

How much can we realistically save on our cloud bill?

Accepted Answer

In our experience, most startups running on AWS or GCP for 12+ months have 20–40% idle or over-provisioned spend. The most common sources: unattached EBS volumes and load balancers, EC2 instances without auto-scaling running at 5% CPU, RDS instances sized for peak load that never happens, and NAT Gateway data transfer fees that can be eliminated with VPC endpoints.

Question 13

Do you use Reserved Instances or Savings Plans?

Accepted Answer

Yes, for stable, predictable workloads. We analyse 3–6 months of usage patterns before recommending commitment purchases. We never recommend Reservations for workloads that are still changing shape — you end up paying for capacity you do not use.

Question 14

What is the difference between SOC2 Type I and Type II?

Accepted Answer

Type I is a point-in-time assessment — an auditor reviews your controls and confirms they are designed correctly at a specific date. Type II covers a period (usually 6 or 12 months) and confirms your controls actually operated effectively over that time. Enterprise customers generally require Type II. Getting Type I first and then Type II is the standard path.

Question 15

How long does ISO 27001 certification take?

Accepted Answer

From starting the ISMS implementation to receiving the certificate: typically 4–9 months depending on your starting point and the size of your team. The audit itself takes 1–2 days. The preparation — policies, risk register, controls, evidence collection — is the bulk of the work.

Question 16

Can we do compliance work without slowing down product development?

Accepted Answer

Yes, with the right approach. The mistake is treating compliance as a separate track that runs in parallel and then merges. The better way is to integrate controls into your existing development workflow — security scanning in CI, access reviews in your sprint process, and change management that maps to your existing PR process. Engineers do not notice it as extra work.

Frequently asked questions

Working with us

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Cloud cost

Compliance

Still have a question?