Should a small SaaS hire a DevOps engineer or outsource?

What is the real choice between hiring and outsourcing DevOps?

The real choice is whether your operational work is a full-time job or a set of recurring tasks that must be done well and on time.

The real choice is not people versus a vendor. It is whether your operational work is a full-time job or a set of recurring tasks that must be done well and on time. Releases, backups, patching, access and cost reviews all need an owner, but at small scale they may only take a few days a month.

Most teams arrive at this question after something has gone wrong: a release that broke checkout, a backup nobody had tested, or an AWS bill that doubled. That is a good moment to decide, but a bad moment to rush a hire.

When does hiring a DevOps engineer make sense?

Hiring makes sense when the work is big enough and constant enough to fill a role, and when it benefits from someone who lives inside your product every day.

• You run several services, environments or regions and change them every week.
• Ops work is already taking more than three or four days a week of a developer's time.
• You need platform work, such as an internal developer platform or Kubernetes, not just upkeep.
• You can afford two people, or accept that holidays and sick days leave gaps.
• You have someone senior enough to manage and review an ops hire.

In the UK, budget about £70,000 to £75,000 a year all-in for one engineer, and more for a senior. Our UK DevOps cost breakdown shows where that figure comes from.

When does outsourcing DevOps make more sense?

Outsourcing makes sense when the work is well understood, recurring and smaller than a full-time role.

• You have one product on AWS, with production and staging, and a handful of services.
• Developers keep losing sprint time to infrastructure chores.
• Nobody can say when a backup was last restored and checked.
• Releases depend on one person who knows how the pipeline works.
• You want cover during holidays without paying for two salaries.

Is DevOps as a service worth it for a small team?

DevOps as a service is worth it for a small team when the provider takes ownership of outcomes, not just tickets: releases that roll back on their own, restores that are tested with proof, and changes that arrive as reviewed pull requests.

It is not worth it if it becomes another queue your developers have to chase, or if it locks your infrastructure into the provider's tooling.

Before you sign anything, ask each provider these questions:

1. Does all code, Terraform and runbooks live in our repositories and our AWS account from day one?
2. Which actions can your automation take on its own, and which need a person and our written approval?
3. How do you prove backups restore, and how often?
4. What happens out of hours, and who gets the alert?
5. What exactly is not included, and how is extra work priced?
6. What is the minimum term, and what do we keep if we leave?

What are the alternatives to hiring a DevOps engineer?

The main alternatives to a DevOps hire are a developer owning ops part-time, a simpler hosting platform, a freelancer, an agency or a managed operations service, and many teams combine two of them.

Many teams combine these. A common pattern is a developer who stays the internal owner and decision maker, with a managed service doing the recurring work and the out-of-hours safety nets.

What does outsourcing DevOps cost compared with hiring?

A full-time UK DevOps engineer costs roughly £70,000 to £75,000 a year once employer National Insurance, pension and tools are included.

Managed operations services usually charge a fixed monthly fee instead. For example, Keel's Core Operations plan is £1,299 a month and Managed Operations is £2,199 a month, each with a 3-month minimum, or 10% less billed yearly. You still pay AWS directly in every option.

The cheaper option is the one that covers the work you actually have. If you only need a few days of ops a month, a salary is expensive. If you need a full-time platform engineer, a managed service will not replace one.

How do you decide whether to hire or outsource DevOps?

Decide by listing last quarter's operational work: a few days a month points to outsourcing, and more than three or four days a week points to hiring.

1. Write down every operational task from the last quarter and roughly how long it took.
2. Mark which tasks went wrong or were late because nobody owned them.
3. If the total is under a few days a month, outsource the recurring work and keep one internal owner.
4. If it is over three or four days a week, start hiring, and outsource in the meantime so nothing slips.
5. Review again every six months, or when the team or the AWS bill grows sharply.

Does your DevOps work need an owner this month?

Tick each statement that describes your team now.