A Decade Empowering World-Leading Engineering Teams
Celebrating 10 Years of solving enterprise challenges and why that matters for your team’s future.
Our Journey
Ten years ago, OpsWerks was founded on a simple but powerful belief: that great people, united by purpose and forged through strong relationships, can transform challenges into opportunities for innovation.
What began as a small, committed support team has grown into a trusted partner to some of the world’s most advanced engineering teams. Together, we’ve helped power mission-critical applications and infrastructure used by millions of people every day.
As I reflect on our butterfly logo, a symbol of growth, evolution, and transformation, I’m struck by how far we’ve come. This 10-year milestone is more than just a celebration of longevity. It’s a testament to the kind of team we’ve built, the partners who’ve trusted us, and the values that have guided us.
With the launch of OpsWerks 2.0, we’re not just marking the past — we’re stepping boldly into the future. Our newly refreshed website at opswerks.com captures more than a brand update; it reflects the experience, capabilities, and culture we’ve developed through a decade of hands-on partnership and relentless learning.
In this post, we’ll share the most important lessons we’ve learned, the challenges platform teams face today, and how our culture and services are designed to meet them.
Whether you’ve been part of our journey or are just discovering us now — welcome.
Intersection of Culture, Challenges, and Collaboration
Over the past decade, our proving ground has been the epicenter of Silicon Valley — working shoulder to shoulder with the world’s most demanding engineering teams.
When your customer’s platform supports millions of global users, when uptime is measured in microseconds, and when infrastructure decisions make or break product launches, you quickly learn what really matters: stability, speed, and trust.
At the heart of our evolution is a powerful intersection:
A culture shaped by relentless curiosity and ownership
A decade of complex, high-impact challenges
Deep collaboration with elite engineering partners
Together, these have forged the capabilities and mindset that define OpsWerks today.
We didn’t just scale our services — we grew our judgment, sharpened our execution, and built a company that understands how to create meaningful outcomes in the most complex environments.
So how did we evolve from a small support team into a trusted partner for world-leading platforms?
What have we learned by navigating some of the toughest DevOps challenges in the world?
And how do those lessons translate into solutions that empower your teams to innovate and win?
Let’s explore the journey — and the outcomes that matter.
Challenges Facing Platform Teams
Over ten years of working with the world’s top platform and infrastructure teams, we’ve seen one truth play out time and again: engineering excellence is being held back by operational noise.
Teams are under immense pressure to maintain uptime, ship features, support migrations, reduce costs, and modernize platforms — all at once. The result? Burnout, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
Here are the most common and costly challenges we’ve seen across the industry:
🔄 Interrupt-Driven Operations
Constant incident response, often from aging, complex systems, robs engineers of rest and focus. Instead of building the future, teams are stuck firefighting the past.
🏗️ Legacy Platform Burden
Teams struggle to modernize because they’re trapped maintaining critical legacy platforms. Progress stalls as effort splits between fixing yesterday and designing tomorrow.
⚖️ Technical Debt Bottlenecks
Innovation slows when teams are stretched thin trying to deliver new features while holding together fragile, debt-laden systems. Tradeoffs become unsustainable.
👤 Attrition and Burnout
Top engineers leave when their work becomes reactive, repetitive, or misaligned with personal growth. Those who remain carry an even heavier load — until they don’t.
🔌 Misaligned Vendor Support
Fragmented outsourcing arrangements create misaligned incentives, communication gaps, and management drag — leading to more problems, not fewer.
These challenges aren’t theoretical. We’ve seen them, and solved them, at scale. The next section shares what we’ve learned about why conventional solutions fall short and what actually works.
Why Current
Approaches Fall Short
Many of the platform teams we’ve supported tried everything before finding us.
They added headcount. They brought in traditional vendors. They rewrote documentation. They built new dashboards. But the results rarely matched the effort.
The reality? Most approaches to operations and support aren’t built for innovation. They’re designed to survive, not scale.
Here’s why they fail — even with the best of intentions:
🛠️ Throwing Headcount at Noise
Hiring more engineers to handle incidents increases payroll without solving root causes. It delays tech debt reduction and traps teams in a cycle of reactivity.
🧩 Fragmented Vendor Support
Traditional outsourcing offers people, not outcomes. Engagements are scoped by time and tickets, not transformation. Teams stay busy, but not better.
🐘 Legacy Systems Never Get Retired
In-house teams stretched across support, innovation, and migration rarely have the bandwidth to decommission legacy platforms — even when modernization is a top priority.
🔄 Temporary Fixes, Permanent Fatigue
Stopgap solutions address symptoms, not systems. Engineers remain on alert. Platforms remain brittle. And innovation stalls.
After ten years in the trenches with the most demanding infrastructure teams on the planet, we’ve seen firsthand that what’s missing isn’t effort — it’s alignment:
Alignment between incentives and outcomes
Alignment between ops noise and team focus
Alignment between partner support and long-term transformation
That’s why we built OpsWerks 2.0 — to deliver a new standard of managed services that truly empowers platform teams to stabilize, scale, and innovate.
A New Approach: OpsWerks 2.0
OpsWerks 2.0 is the result of a decade of high-stakes learning, earned trust, and relentless improvement.
Born in the heart of Silicon Valley and forged alongside the world’s most demanding infrastructure teams, our approach has always focused on what matters most: empowering your best people by removing what slows them down.
We don’t replace engineering teams — we extend them. We handle the operational noise, stabilize legacy systems, and unlock your full-time teams to focus on what they do best: building, innovating, and accelerating delivery.
Capabilities That Power Your Outcomes
Our capabilities have grown dramatically — shaped by real-world complexity and sharpened by results. Here’s how we partner with some of the most sophisticated teams on the planet:
Cloud and Infrastructure
Beyond basic migrations — we deliver scalable, automated infrastructure that evolves with your business. From provisioning to cost optimization, our cloud practice ensures speed without sacrificing resilience.
Platform Operations
Full lifecycle Kubernetes management and CI/CD enablement. We streamline builds, pipelines, and environments so your developers can ship faster — with confidence and clarity.
Monitoring and Incident Response
Intelligent alerting, 24/7 global coverage, and rapid root cause resolution. Our teams don’t just respond — they communicate, coordinate, and continuously reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
AI and Data Engineering
We build the infrastructure and data pipelines that make AI and advanced analytics possible. Scalable. Reliable. Performance-tuned for your data science and product teams.
Security and Compliance
We help you stay audit-ready with security posture management, compliance tracking, and systematic documentation — all baked into your infrastructure, not bolted on.
Managed Services that Evolve
Our outcome-driven managed services model flexes as your needs change. No bloat. No silos. Just the right team, with the right tools, solving the right problems — day and night.
Certified to Deliver
Our team's commitment to excellence is validated through extensive technology certifications across leading platforms. These credentials demonstrate our continued growth mindset and prove our evolving capabilities to tackle complex challenges with cutting-edge expertise.
Examples of industry certifications:
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Google Associate Cloud Engineer | Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals Datacamp: Data Engineer Associate Splunk Core Certified User Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow Fundamentals |
What Makes OpsWerks
Managed Services Unique
Every capability we offer is rooted in a culture shaped by high-pressure, mission-critical work.
Our team is trained to solve real problems, not just surface symptoms, and our delivery model reflects that focus.
Here’s how we approach managed services differently:
🎯 Goals and Incentives Aligned to Your Success
We’re not measured by ticket volume or time spent. We succeed when you do — by solving root causes, enabling innovation, and delivering lasting impact.
📄 Transparent Pricing, Built for Partnership
Fixed, predictable pricing with no surprise invoices and no scope-creep traps. You get cost certainty and shared clarity from day one.
🌍 Resilient Team Structures
Global 24/7 coverage with built-in redundancy. We deliver consistent quality through stable, trained teams that know your environment — not a rotating cast of contractors.
🚀 Fast, Autonomous Onboarding
When one partner faced chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a full upgrade cycle in 90 days — with zero downtime. We bring the same disciplined autonomy to every engagement.
📐 Execution That Scales
You define the outcomes. We own the delivery. From runbooks to automation to stakeholder updates, we operate with confidence — so you don’t have to look over our shoulder.
Real-World Customer Impact
These examples highlight how our culture and experience empower teams to innovate and deliver:
Accelerating Time-to-Market by Two Years
For a Fortune 500 software and hardware leader, our support enabled them to fast-track their new CI/CD platform, achieving General Availability (GA) two years earlier than projected. Platform outages decreased by 10x, achieving 99% uptime, while technical debt was halved within the first six months.
Bringing 100,000+ Hosts up to Security Standards in 6 Months
A multinational consumer electronics firm, relies on critical infrastructure of over 100,000 hosts that support development platforms and essential internal applications. With mounting technical debt and the need to align with rigorous security standards, their SRE team faced a significant challenge in balancing maintenance with delivering strategic features.
Keeping Hundreds of Millions of User Connected
For a Fortune 500 customer's application accessed daily by hundreds of millions of users, we reduced critical errors significantly and dropped technical debt to impressively low levels that have been maintained consistently.
Upgrading 500+ Live Kubernetes Clusters in 90 Days
When faced with version chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a complete upgrade cycle in 90 days without major disruptions. Service disruptions from version upgrades were eliminated and mean time to recovery (MTTR) was significantly reduced.
Learn more about our impact here.
Moving Forward Together
Our promise is simple: We take care of what’s holding your team back — so they can move forward.
That’s the OpsWerks difference.
Visit opswerks.com to learn how we can help your team move forward.
A Decade Empowering World-Leading Engineering Teams
Celebrating 10 Years of solving enterprise challenges and why that matters for your team’s future.
Our Journey
Ten years ago, OpsWerks was founded on a simple but powerful belief: that great people, united by purpose and forged through strong relationships, can transform challenges into opportunities for innovation.
What began as a small, committed support team has grown into a trusted partner to some of the world’s most advanced engineering teams. Together, we’ve helped power mission-critical applications and infrastructure used by millions of people every day.
As I reflect on our butterfly logo, a symbol of growth, evolution, and transformation, I’m struck by how far we’ve come. This 10-year milestone is more than just a celebration of longevity. It’s a testament to the kind of team we’ve built, the partners who’ve trusted us, and the values that have guided us.
With the launch of OpsWerks 2.0, we’re not just marking the past — we’re stepping boldly into the future. Our newly refreshed website at opswerks.com captures more than a brand update; it reflects the experience, capabilities, and culture we’ve developed through a decade of hands-on partnership and relentless learning.
In this post, we’ll share the most important lessons we’ve learned, the challenges platform teams face today, and how our culture and services are designed to meet them.
Whether you’ve been part of our journey or are just discovering us now — welcome.
Intersection of Culture, Challenges, and Collaboration
Over the past decade, our proving ground has been the epicenter of Silicon Valley — working shoulder to shoulder with the world’s most demanding engineering teams.
When your customer’s platform supports millions of global users, when uptime is measured in microseconds, and when infrastructure decisions make or break product launches, you quickly learn what really matters: stability, speed, and trust.
At the heart of our evolution is a powerful intersection:
A culture shaped by relentless curiosity and ownership
A decade of complex, high-impact challenges
Deep collaboration with elite engineering partners
Together, these have forged the capabilities and mindset that define OpsWerks today.
We didn’t just scale our services — we grew our judgment, sharpened our execution, and built a company that understands how to create meaningful outcomes in the most complex environments.
So how did we evolve from a small support team into a trusted partner for world-leading platforms?
What have we learned by navigating some of the toughest DevOps challenges in the world?
And how do those lessons translate into solutions that empower your teams to innovate and win?
Let’s explore the journey — and the outcomes that matter.
Challenges Facing Platform Teams
Over ten years of working with the world’s top platform and infrastructure teams, we’ve seen one truth play out time and again: engineering excellence is being held back by operational noise.
Teams are under immense pressure to maintain uptime, ship features, support migrations, reduce costs, and modernize platforms — all at once. The result? Burnout, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
Here are the most common and costly challenges we’ve seen across the industry:
🔄 Interrupt-Driven Operations
Constant incident response, often from aging, complex systems, robs engineers of rest and focus. Instead of building the future, teams are stuck firefighting the past.
🏗️ Legacy Platform Burden
Teams struggle to modernize because they’re trapped maintaining critical legacy platforms. Progress stalls as effort splits between fixing yesterday and designing tomorrow.
⚖️ Technical Debt Bottlenecks
Innovation slows when teams are stretched thin trying to deliver new features while holding together fragile, debt-laden systems. Tradeoffs become unsustainable.
👤 Attrition and Burnout
Top engineers leave when their work becomes reactive, repetitive, or misaligned with personal growth. Those who remain carry an even heavier load — until they don’t.
🔌 Misaligned Vendor Support
Fragmented outsourcing arrangements create misaligned incentives, communication gaps, and management drag — leading to more problems, not fewer.
These challenges aren’t theoretical. We’ve seen them, and solved them, at scale. The next section shares what we’ve learned about why conventional solutions fall short and what actually works.
Why Current
Approaches Fall Short
Many of the platform teams we’ve supported tried everything before finding us.
They added headcount. They brought in traditional vendors. They rewrote documentation. They built new dashboards. But the results rarely matched the effort.
The reality? Most approaches to operations and support aren’t built for innovation. They’re designed to survive, not scale.
Here’s why they fail — even with the best of intentions:
🛠️ Throwing Headcount at Noise
Hiring more engineers to handle incidents increases payroll without solving root causes. It delays tech debt reduction and traps teams in a cycle of reactivity.
🧩 Fragmented Vendor Support
Traditional outsourcing offers people, not outcomes. Engagements are scoped by time and tickets, not transformation. Teams stay busy, but not better.
🐘 Legacy Systems Never Get Retired
In-house teams stretched across support, innovation, and migration rarely have the bandwidth to decommission legacy platforms — even when modernization is a top priority.
🔄 Temporary Fixes, Permanent Fatigue
Stopgap solutions address symptoms, not systems. Engineers remain on alert. Platforms remain brittle. And innovation stalls.
After ten years in the trenches with the most demanding infrastructure teams on the planet, we’ve seen firsthand that what’s missing isn’t effort — it’s alignment:
Alignment between incentives and outcomes
Alignment between ops noise and team focus
Alignment between partner support and long-term transformation
That’s why we built OpsWerks 2.0 — to deliver a new standard of managed services that truly empowers platform teams to stabilize, scale, and innovate.
A New Approach: OpsWerks 2.0
OpsWerks 2.0 is the result of a decade of high-stakes learning, earned trust, and relentless improvement.
Born in the heart of Silicon Valley and forged alongside the world’s most demanding infrastructure teams, our approach has always focused on what matters most: empowering your best people by removing what slows them down.
We don’t replace engineering teams — we extend them. We handle the operational noise, stabilize legacy systems, and unlock your full-time teams to focus on what they do best: building, innovating, and accelerating delivery.
Capabilities That Power Your Outcomes
Our capabilities have grown dramatically — shaped by real-world complexity and sharpened by results. Here’s how we partner with some of the most sophisticated teams on the planet:
Cloud and Infrastructure
Beyond basic migrations — we deliver scalable, automated infrastructure that evolves with your business. From provisioning to cost optimization, our cloud practice ensures speed without sacrificing resilience.
Platform Operations
Full lifecycle Kubernetes management and CI/CD enablement. We streamline builds, pipelines, and environments so your developers can ship faster — with confidence and clarity.
Monitoring and Incident Response
Intelligent alerting, 24/7 global coverage, and rapid root cause resolution. Our teams don’t just respond — they communicate, coordinate, and continuously reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
AI and Data Engineering
We build the infrastructure and data pipelines that make AI and advanced analytics possible. Scalable. Reliable. Performance-tuned for your data science and product teams.
Security and Compliance
We help you stay audit-ready with security posture management, compliance tracking, and systematic documentation — all baked into your infrastructure, not bolted on.
Managed Services that Evolve
Our outcome-driven managed services model flexes as your needs change. No bloat. No silos. Just the right team, with the right tools, solving the right problems — day and night.
Certified to Deliver
Our team's commitment to excellence is validated through extensive technology certifications across leading platforms. These credentials demonstrate our continued growth mindset and prove our evolving capabilities to tackle complex challenges with cutting-edge expertise.
Examples of industry certifications:
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Google Associate Cloud Engineer | Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals Datacamp: Data Engineer Associate Splunk Core Certified User Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow Fundamentals |
What Makes OpsWerks
Managed Services Unique
Every capability we offer is rooted in a culture shaped by high-pressure, mission-critical work.
Our team is trained to solve real problems, not just surface symptoms, and our delivery model reflects that focus.
Here’s how we approach managed services differently:
🎯 Goals and Incentives Aligned to Your Success
We’re not measured by ticket volume or time spent. We succeed when you do — by solving root causes, enabling innovation, and delivering lasting impact.
📄 Transparent Pricing, Built for Partnership
Fixed, predictable pricing with no surprise invoices and no scope-creep traps. You get cost certainty and shared clarity from day one.
🌍 Resilient Team Structures
Global 24/7 coverage with built-in redundancy. We deliver consistent quality through stable, trained teams that know your environment — not a rotating cast of contractors.
🚀 Fast, Autonomous Onboarding
When one partner faced chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a full upgrade cycle in 90 days — with zero downtime. We bring the same disciplined autonomy to every engagement.
📐 Execution That Scales
You define the outcomes. We own the delivery. From runbooks to automation to stakeholder updates, we operate with confidence — so you don’t have to look over our shoulder.
Real-World Customer Impact
These examples highlight how our culture and experience empower teams to innovate and deliver:
Accelerating Time-to-Market by Two Years
For a Fortune 500 software and hardware leader, our support enabled them to fast-track their new CI/CD platform, achieving General Availability (GA) two years earlier than projected. Platform outages decreased by 10x, achieving 99% uptime, while technical debt was halved within the first six months.
Bringing 100,000+ Hosts up to Security Standards in 6 Months
A multinational consumer electronics firm, relies on critical infrastructure of over 100,000 hosts that support development platforms and essential internal applications. With mounting technical debt and the need to align with rigorous security standards, their SRE team faced a significant challenge in balancing maintenance with delivering strategic features.
Keeping Hundreds of Millions of User Connected
For a Fortune 500 customer's application accessed daily by hundreds of millions of users, we reduced critical errors significantly and dropped technical debt to impressively low levels that have been maintained consistently.
Upgrading 500+ Live Kubernetes Clusters in 90 Days
When faced with version chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a complete upgrade cycle in 90 days without major disruptions. Service disruptions from version upgrades were eliminated and mean time to recovery (MTTR) was significantly reduced.
Learn more about our impact here.
Moving Forward Together
Our promise is simple: We take care of what’s holding your team back — so they can move forward.
That’s the OpsWerks difference.
Visit opswerks.com to learn how we can help your team move forward.
Stop toil. Start scaling.
To break this cycle, enterprises often need outside help. By shifting the load, you can free full-time employees (FTEs) to focus on strategic initiatives — and restore morale. The question is, what kind of help?
In this blog, we'll compare two outsourcing options: staff augmentation vs. managed services. But first, why not just hire more FTEs to relieve overworked teams and solve underlying problems? It often comes down to time and money:
Time
It can take 44 to 67 days to hire the right
candidate, depending on the role.
It can take 44 to 67 days to hire the right candidate, depending on the role.
Recruiting
The search and interview process costs up to $4,700.
The search and interview process costs up to $4,700.
Onboarding
Initial set-up and training adds up to $28,000.
Initial set-up and training adds up to $28,000.
Improving DevOps and SRE with outsourcing
When done correctly, outsourcing can do more than fill gaps — it helps DevOps and SRE teams catapult from average to elite results. Does your team meet the top performance and reliability benchmarks set by Google's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)? Most enterprises, weighed down by technical debt and slow hiring cycles, fall short of elite DORA standards.
The result: delays, hidden costs, and performance gaps you can measure:
When done correctly, outsourcing can do more than fill gaps — it helps DevOps and SRE teams catapult from average to elite results. Does your team meet the top performance and reliability benchmarks set by Google's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)? Most enterprises, weighed down by technical debt and slow hiring cycles, fall short of elite DORA standards.
The result: delays, hidden costs, and performance gaps you can measure:
Elite teams deploy 182× more frequently than low performers.
Elite teams deploy 182× more frequently than low performers.
Outsourcing not only accelerates time-to-value — it puts elite DORA metrics within reach.
Outsourcing not only accelerates time-to-value — it puts elite DORA metrics within reach.
Staff augmentation vs. managed services: a guide for outsourcing DevOps or SRE
Once you’ve decided to outsource, you face two choices:
1) Managed service providers (MSP) take responsibility for critical operations, managing a specific project or ongoing operations end to end — from tooling and staffing to delivery of agreed-upon outcomes.
2) Staff augmentation provides contractors who work as part of your existing in-house team under your direct management and oversight.
The choice between the two depends on your strategic goals, internal capabilities, project complexity, and other considerations. Let’s compare side-by-side.
Factors
Goals
Incentives
Best Fit When
Use cases
Responsibility
Expertise
Management Overhead
Pricing
Managed Services
Add short-term headcount to quickly meet tight, unexpected deadlines or fill a temporary skills gap in DevOps or SRE.
Individual contractors and staffing vendors are incentivized by billable time (headcount × hours), not long-term efficiencies or automation.
You have an urgent short-term project with a narrow scope. For clarity, ask yourself if adding a few extra hands will make a measurable difference. Also be sure you have time to train and manage the contractors since they will be under your direct supervision.
Smaller, short-term projects:
Filling temporary skills gaps
Performing limited-scope work
Scaling for demand surges
Supporting seasonal spikes
Your team manages and executes the work — from interviewing and onboarding contractors to strategic planning and implementation. You own outcomes and assume the risks.
You recruit, hire, and train skilled DevOps or SRE contractors to fill specific gaps or supplement your team.
The flexibility to quickly scale your headcount comes with a tradeoff: higher management overhead. It requires your time and money to recruit, onboard, align, and oversee contractors. This is further complicated by turnover, inconsistent team composition, sick days, and vacations. Vendor pressure to add more headcount results in more of the same overhead costs.
Pricing is variable, based on pay rates and hours worked, so as the scope expands, so do costs. When pricing by headcount, staffing firms are more likely to focus on growing contracts. In turn, unpredictable costs become another aspect to manage. To counter this problem, some vendors claim to offer a “fixed price model,” but it’s still based on headcount with management overhead scaling linearly.
Staff Augmentation
Offload ownership of daily operations or scoped projects to a self-managed team focused on your long-term goals.
A fixed-price model incentivizes the MSP to deliver outcomes that align with long-term efficiencies and automations, not time spent.
You need a partner to take ownership of outcomes for one or more complex, long-term initiatives. Managed services are well suited for mature DevOps or SRE teams with established processes. It's also ideal for teams that need to reduce toil while improving scalability and reliability.
Larger, long-term initiatives:
Executing legacy migrations
Optimizing AI infrastructure
Leading modernization efforts
Improving scale and reliability
Reducing burnout and attrition
Sustaining delivery amid hiring freeze
The MSP owns the responsibility — and the risk — of delivering agreed-upon outcomes. Shifting the operational load enables FTEs to focus on high-priority initiatives.
You gain ready-made teams of experts who bring skills, structure, and cohesion — guided by best practices and established processes.
Self-managed teams with built-in redundancies provide reliable and consistent 24/7 global coverage that requires less oversight. Team members cross-train each other, reducing your need to train. Full alignment with your desired outcomes, methodical execution, and proven efficiency practices minimize management overhead.
Pricing follows a predictable, fixed-fee model for self-managed teams with built-in redundancies. Instead of paying by headcount, you pay for the managed services team to deliver your pre-defined and agreed upon outcomes. Pricing has been defined so the focus is on automations, improvements, and addresses root causes — not hours billed. Any additional costs are incurred by the managed services provider, so they are motivated to drive efficiencies.
To summarize, staff augmentation can give your team the extra bandwidth or expertise needed for urgent short-term projects if: a) you have the capacity to train and manage individual contractors; b) the challenge is narrow in scope; and c) a few extra hands can make a real difference.
Managed services, by contrast, are the better choice when you need a trusted partner to take ownership of outcomes for complex, ongoing or large-scale initiatives — especially well-suited for hyperscale operations.
If you’re leaning toward managed services, the next step is selecting the right managed service provider for DevOps or SRE.
Factors
Goals
Incentives
Best Fit When
Use cases
Responsibility
Expertise
Management Overhead
Pricing
Managed Services
Add short-term headcount to quickly meet tight, unexpected deadlines or fill a temporary skills gap in DevOps or SRE.
Individual contractors and staffing vendors are incentivized by billable time (headcount × hours), not long-term efficiencies or automation.
You have an urgent short-term project with a narrow scope. For clarity, ask yourself if adding a few extra hands will make a measurable difference. Also be sure you have time to train and manage the contractors since they will be under your direct supervision.
Smaller, short-term projects:
Filling temporary skills gaps
Performing limited-scope work
Scaling for demand surges
Supporting seasonal spikes
Your team manages and executes the work — from interviewing and onboarding contractors to strategic planning and implementation. You own outcomes and assume the risks.
You recruit, hire, and train skilled DevOps or SRE contractors to fill specific gaps or supplement your team.
The flexibility to quickly scale your headcount comes with a tradeoff: higher management overhead. It requires your time and money to recruit, onboard, align, and oversee contractors. This is further complicated by turnover, inconsistent team composition, sick days, and vacations. Vendor pressure to add more headcount results in more of the same overhead costs.
Pricing is variable, based on pay rates and hours worked, so as the scope expands, so do costs. When pricing by headcount, staffing firms are more likely to focus on growing contracts. In turn, unpredictable costs become another aspect to manage. To counter this problem, some vendors claim to offer a “fixed price model,” but it’s still based on headcount with management overhead scaling linearly.
Staff Augmentation
Offload ownership of daily operations or scoped projects to a self-managed team focused on your long-term goals.
A fixed-price model incentivizes the MSP to deliver outcomes that align with long-term efficiencies and automations, not time spent.
You need a partner to take ownership of outcomes for one or more complex, long-term initiatives. Managed services are well suited for mature DevOps or SRE teams with established processes. It's also ideal for teams that need to reduce toil while improving scalability and reliability.
Large, complex, long-term initiatives:
Executing legacy migrations
Optimizing AI infrastructure
Leading modernization efforts
Improving scale and reliability
Reducing burnout and attrition
Sustaining delivery amid hiring freeze
The MSP owns the responsibility — and the risk — of delivering agreed-upon outcomes. Shifting the operational load enables FTEs to focus on high-priority initiatives.
You gain ready-made teams of experts who bring skills, structure, and cohesion — guided by best practices and established processes.
Self-managed teams with built-in redundancies provide reliable and consistent 24/7 global coverage that requires less oversight. Team members cross-train each other, reducing your need to train. Full alignment with your desired outcomes, methodical execution, and proven efficiency practices minimize management overhead.
Pricing follows a predictable, fixed-fee model for self-managed teams with built-in redundancies. Instead of paying by headcount, you pay for the managed services team to deliver your pre-defined and agreed upon outcomes. Pricing has been defined so the focus is on automations, improvements, and addresses root causes — not hours billed. Any additional costs are incurred by the managed services provider, so they are motivated to drive efficiencies.
Why choose OpsWerks managed services for DevOps and SRE?
OpsWerks offers fixed pricing aligned to results. For over a decade, we’ve earned the trust of the world’s leading engineering teams by delivering impactful outcomes. We partner with DevOps and SRE teams to address root causes, drive improvements and lasting operational excellence. Key factors that make this possible:
Outcome Ownership
Outcome Ownership
We take full responsibility for solving issues end-to-end, not just reacting to incidents or adding headcount.
We take full responsibility for solving issues end-to-end, not just reacting to incidents or adding headcount.
Autonomous execution
Autonomous execution
What it means: after jointly defining your desired state, we execute relentlessly, building automation, authoring runbooks, and streamlining operations without constant direction.
What it means: after jointly defining your desired state, we execute relentlessly, building automation, authoring runbooks, and streamlining operations without constant direction.
Predictable partnership
Predictable partnership
OpsWerks delivers resilient, self-managed teams that operate under fixed, transparent pricing, eliminating headcount discussions and reducing risk from turnover or absence.
OpsWerks delivers resilient, self-managed teams that operate under fixed, transparent pricing, eliminating headcount discussions and reducing risk from turnover or absence.
From cloud infrastructure and platform ops to incident response and AI readiness — we do more than support your systems. We evolve them — with stability, scale, and speed.
Proven outcomes with OpsWerks managed services
10x reduction in platform outages and 99.9% uptime . This achievement accelerated a global tech giant’s time-to-market with its CI/CD platform two years earlier than expected.
10x reduction in platform outages and 99.9% uptime . This achievement accelerated a global tech giant’s time-to-market with its CI/CD platform two years earlier than expected.
100,000+ hosts secured in 6 months. The OpsWerks DevOps and SRE teams modernized and secured critical infrastructure without disrupting strategic development.
100,000+ hosts secured in 6 months. The OpsWerks DevOps and SRE teams modernized and secured critical infrastructure without disrupting strategic development.
500+ Kubernetes clusters upgraded in 90 days. Facing instability across clusters, a leading-edge company partnered with OpsWerks to execute seamless upgrades — with zero downtime and significantly improved MTTR.
500+ Kubernetes clusters upgraded in 90 days. Facing instability across clusters, a leading-edge company partnered with OpsWerks to execute seamless upgrades — with zero downtime and significantly improved MTTR.
Hundreds of millions of users supported. For an app accessed daily by hundreds of millions, OpsWerks reduced critical errors, minimized tech debt, and stabilized operations at scale.
Hundreds of millions of users supported. For an app accessed daily by hundreds of millions, OpsWerks reduced critical errors, minimized tech debt, and stabilized operations at scale.
Why choose OpsWerks managed services for DevOps and SRE?
OpsWerks offers fixed pricing aligned to results. For over a decade, we’ve earned the trust of the world’s leading engineering teams by delivering impactful outcomes. We partner with DevOps and SRE teams to address root causes, drive improvements and lasting operational excellence. Key factors that make this possible:
Outcome Ownership
We take full responsibility for solving issues end-to-end, not just reacting to incidents or adding headcount.
Autonomous execution
What it means: after jointly defining your desired state, we execute relentlessly, building automation, authoring runbooks, and streamlining operations without constant direction.
Predictable partnership
OpsWerks delivers resilient, self-managed teams that operate under fixed, transparent pricing, eliminating headcount discussions and reducing risk from turnover or absence.
From cloud infrastructure and platform ops to incident response and AI readiness — we do more than support your systems. We evolve them — with stability, scale, and speed.
Proven outcomes with OpsWerks managed services
10x reduction in platform outages and 99.9% uptime . This achievement accelerated a global tech giant’s time-to-market with its CI/CD platform two years earlier than expected.
100,000+ hosts secured in 6 months. The OpsWerks DevOps and SRE teams modernized and secured critical infrastructure without disrupting strategic development.
500+ Kubernetes clusters upgraded in 90 days. Facing instability across clusters, a leading-edge company partnered with OpsWerks to execute seamless upgrades — with zero downtime and significantly improved MTTR.
Hundreds of millions of users supported. For an app accessed daily by hundreds of millions, OpsWerks reduced critical errors, minimized tech debt, and stabilized operations at scale.
Stop toil. Start scaling.
To break this cycle, enterprises often need outside help. By shifting the load, you can free full-time employees (FTEs) to focus on strategic initiatives — and restore morale. The question is, what kind of help?
In this blog, we'll compare two outsourcing options: staff augmentation vs. managed services. But first, why not just hire more FTEs to relieve overworked teams and solve underlying problems? It often comes down to time and money:
Time
It can take 44 to 67 days to hire the right candidate, depending on the role.
Recruiting
The search and interview process costs up to $4,700.
Onboarding
Initial set-up and training adds up to $28,000.
Ramp-up
New hires take up to 8 months to reach full productivity.
Improving DevOps and SRE with outsourcing
When done correctly, outsourcing can do more than fill gaps — it helps DevOps and SRE teams catapult from average to elite results. Does your team meet the top performance and reliability benchmarks set by Google's DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)? Most enterprises, weighed down by technical debt and slow hiring cycles, fall short of elite DORA standards.
The result: delays, hidden costs, and performance gaps you can measure:
Outsourcing not only accelerates time-to-value — it puts elite DORA metrics within reach.
Staff augmentation vs. managed services: a guide for outsourcing DevOps or SRE
Once you’ve decided to outsource, you face two choices:
1) Managed service providers (MSP) take responsibility for critical operations, managing a specific project or ongoing operations end to end — from tooling and staffing to delivery of agreed-upon outcomes.
2) Staff augmentation provides contractors who work as part of your existing in-house team under your direct management and oversight.
The choice between the two depends on your strategic goals, internal capabilities, project complexity, and other considerations. Let’s compare side-by-side.
To summarize, staff augmentation can give your team the extra bandwidth or expertise needed for urgent short-term projects if: a) you have the capacity to train and manage individual contractors; b) the challenge is narrow in scope; and c) a few extra hands can make a real difference.
Managed services, by contrast, are the better choice when you need a trusted partner to take ownership of outcomes for complex, ongoing or large-scale initiatives — especially well-suited for hyperscale operations.
If you’re leaning toward managed services, the next step is selecting the right managed service provider for DevOps or SRE.
Managed Services
Goals
Add short-term headcount to quickly meet tight, unexpected deadlines or fill a temporary skills gap in DevOps or SRE.
Incentives
Individual contractors and staffing vendors are incentivized by billable time (headcount × hours), not long-term efficiencies or automation.
Best Fit When
You have an urgent short-term project with a narrow scope. For clarity, ask yourself if adding a few extra hands will make a measurable difference. Also be sure you have time to train and manage the contractors since they will be under your direct supervision.
Use cases
Smaller, short-term projects:
Filling temporary skills gaps
Performing limited-scope work
Scaling for demand surges
Supporting seasonal spikes
Responsibility
Your team manages and executes the work — from interviewing and onboarding contractors to strategic planning and implementation. You own outcomes and assume the risks.
Expertise
You recruit, hire, and train skilled DevOps or SRE contractors to fill specific gaps or supplement your team.
Management Overhead
The flexibility to quickly scale your headcount comes with a tradeoff: higher management overhead. It requires your time and money to recruit, onboard, align, and oversee contractors. This is further complicated by turnover, inconsistent team composition, sick days, and vacations. Vendor pressure to add more headcount results in more of the same overhead costs.
Pricing
Pricing is variable, based on pay rates and hours worked, so as the scope expands, so do costs. When pricing by headcount, staffing firms are more likely to focus on growing contracts. In turn, unpredictable costs become another aspect to manage. To counter this problem, some vendors claim to offer a “fixed price model,” but it’s still based on headcount with management overhead scaling linearly.
Staff Augmentation
Goals
Offload ownership of daily operations or scoped projects to a self-managed team focused on your long-term goals.
Incentives
A fixed-price model incentivizes the MSP to deliver outcomes that align with long-term efficiencies and automations, not time spent.
Best Fit When
You need a partner to take ownership of outcomes for one or more complex, long-term initiatives. Managed services are well suited for mature DevOps or SRE teams with established processes. It's also ideal for teams that need to reduce toil while improving scalability and reliability.
Use cases
Large, complex, long-term initiatives:
Executing legacy migrations
Optimizing AI infrastructure
Leading modernization efforts
Improving scale and reliability
Reducing burnout and attrition
Sustaining delivery amid hiring freeze
Responsibility
The MSP owns the responsibility — and the risk — of delivering agreed-upon outcomes. Shifting the operational load enables FTEs to focus on high-priority initiatives.
Expertise
You gain ready-made teams of experts who bring skills, structure, and cohesion — guided by best practices and established processes.
Management Overhead
Self-managed teams with built-in redundancies provide reliable and consistent 24/7 global coverage that requires less oversight. Team members cross-train each other, reducing your need to train. Full alignment with your desired outcomes, methodical execution, and proven efficiency practices minimize management overhead.
Pricing
Pricing follows a predictable, fixed-fee model for self-managed teams with built-in redundancies. Instead of paying by headcount, you pay for the managed services team to deliver your pre-defined and agreed upon outcomes. Pricing has been defined so the focus is on automations, improvements, and addresses root causes — not hours billed. Any additional costs are incurred by the managed services provider, so they are motivated to drive efficiencies.
When every deployment affects hundreds of millions of users and downtime is measured in milliseconds, even world-class DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams reach their limits. Quick patches, manual overrides, and other short-term fixes add technical debt, increasing the likelihood of future failures.
So how do you reduce toil and improve operational resilience when firefighting itself creates an endless cycle — one that leads to burnout and missed targets?
A Decade Empowering World-Leading Engineering Teams
Celebrating 10 Years of solving enterprise challenges and why that matters for your team’s future.
Our Journey
Ten years ago, OpsWerks was founded on a simple but powerful belief: that great people, united by purpose and forged through strong relationships, can transform challenges into opportunities for innovation.
What began as a small, committed support team has grown into a trusted partner to some of the world’s most advanced engineering teams. Together, we’ve helped power mission-critical applications and infrastructure used by millions of people every day.
As I reflect on our butterfly logo, a symbol of growth, evolution, and transformation, I’m struck by how far we’ve come. This 10-year milestone is more than just a celebration of longevity. It’s a testament to the kind of team we’ve built, the partners who’ve trusted us, and the values that have guided us.
With the launch of OpsWerks 2.0, we’re not just marking the past — we’re stepping boldly into the future. Our newly refreshed website at opswerks.com captures more than a brand update; it reflects the experience, capabilities, and culture we’ve developed through a decade of hands-on partnership and relentless learning.
In this post, we’ll share the most important lessons we’ve learned, the challenges platform teams face today, and how our culture and services are designed to meet them.
Whether you’ve been part of our journey or are just discovering us now — welcome.
Intersection of Culture, Challenges, and Collaboration
Over the past decade, our proving ground has been the epicenter of Silicon Valley — working shoulder to shoulder with the world’s most demanding engineering teams.
When your customer’s platform supports millions of global users, when uptime is measured in microseconds, and when infrastructure decisions make or break product launches, you quickly learn what really matters: stability, speed, and trust.
At the heart of our evolution is a powerful intersection:
A culture shaped by relentless curiosity and ownership
A decade of complex, high-impact challenges
Deep collaboration with elite engineering partners
Together, these have forged the capabilities and mindset that define OpsWerks today.
We didn’t just scale our services — we grew our judgment, sharpened our execution, and built a company that understands how to create meaningful outcomes in the most complex environments.
So how did we evolve from a small support team into a trusted partner for world-leading platforms?
What have we learned by navigating some of the toughest DevOps challenges in the world?
And how do those lessons translate into solutions that empower your teams to innovate and win?
Let’s explore the journey — and the outcomes that matter.
Challenges Facing Platform Teams
Over ten years of working with the world’s top platform and infrastructure teams, we’ve seen one truth play out time and again: engineering excellence is being held back by operational noise.
Teams are under immense pressure to maintain uptime, ship features, support migrations, reduce costs, and modernize platforms — all at once. The result? Burnout, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
Here are the most common and costly challenges we’ve seen across the industry:
🔄 Interrupt-Driven Operations
Constant incident response, often from aging, complex systems, robs engineers of rest and focus. Instead of building the future, teams are stuck firefighting the past.
🏗️ Legacy Platform Burden
Teams struggle to modernize because they’re trapped maintaining critical legacy platforms. Progress stalls as effort splits between fixing yesterday and designing tomorrow.
⚖️ Technical Debt Bottlenecks
Innovation slows when teams are stretched thin trying to deliver new features while holding together fragile, debt-laden systems. Tradeoffs become unsustainable.
👤 Attrition and Burnout
Top engineers leave when their work becomes reactive, repetitive, or misaligned with personal growth. Those who remain carry an even heavier load — until they don’t.
🔌 Misaligned Vendor Support
Fragmented outsourcing arrangements create misaligned incentives, communication gaps, and management drag — leading to more problems, not fewer.
These challenges aren’t theoretical. We’ve seen them, and solved them, at scale. The next section shares what we’ve learned about why conventional solutions fall short and what actually works.
Why Current
Approaches Fall Short
Many of the platform teams we’ve supported tried everything before finding us.
They added headcount. They brought in traditional vendors. They rewrote documentation. They built new dashboards. But the results rarely matched the effort.
The reality? Most approaches to operations and support aren’t built for innovation. They’re designed to survive, not scale.
Here’s why they fail — even with the best of intentions:
🛠️ Throwing Headcount at Noise
Hiring more engineers to handle incidents increases payroll without solving root causes. It delays tech debt reduction and traps teams in a cycle of reactivity.
🧩 Fragmented Vendor Support
Traditional outsourcing offers people, not outcomes. Engagements are scoped by time and tickets, not transformation. Teams stay busy, but not better.
🐘 Legacy Systems Never Get Retired
In-house teams stretched across support, innovation, and migration rarely have the bandwidth to decommission legacy platforms — even when modernization is a top priority.
🔄 Temporary Fixes, Permanent Fatigue
Stopgap solutions address symptoms, not systems. Engineers remain on alert. Platforms remain brittle. And innovation stalls.
After ten years in the trenches with the most demanding infrastructure teams on the planet, we’ve seen firsthand that what’s missing isn’t effort — it’s alignment:
Alignment between incentives and outcomes
Alignment between ops noise and team focus
Alignment between partner support and long-term transformation
That’s why we built OpsWerks 2.0 — to deliver a new standard of managed services that truly empowers platform teams to stabilize, scale, and innovate.
A New Approach: OpsWerks 2.0
OpsWerks 2.0 is the result of a decade of high-stakes learning, earned trust, and relentless improvement.
Born in the heart of Silicon Valley and forged alongside the world’s most demanding infrastructure teams, our approach has always focused on what matters most: empowering your best people by removing what slows them down.
We don’t replace engineering teams — we extend them. We handle the operational noise, stabilize legacy systems, and unlock your full-time teams to focus on what they do best: building, innovating, and accelerating delivery.
Capabilities That Power Your Outcomes
Our capabilities have grown dramatically — shaped by real-world complexity and sharpened by results. Here’s how we partner with some of the most sophisticated teams on the planet:
Cloud and Infrastructure
Beyond basic migrations — we deliver scalable, automated infrastructure that evolves with your business. From provisioning to cost optimization, our cloud practice ensures speed without sacrificing resilience.
Platform Operations
Full lifecycle Kubernetes management and CI/CD enablement. We streamline builds, pipelines, and environments so your developers can ship faster — with confidence and clarity.
Monitoring and Incident Response
Intelligent alerting, 24/7 global coverage, and rapid root cause resolution. Our teams don’t just respond — they communicate, coordinate, and continuously reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
AI and Data Engineering
We build the infrastructure and data pipelines that make AI and advanced analytics possible. Scalable. Reliable. Performance-tuned for your data science and product teams.
Security and Compliance
We help you stay audit-ready with security posture management, compliance tracking, and systematic documentation — all baked into your infrastructure, not bolted on.
Managed Services that Evolve
Our outcome-driven managed services model flexes as your needs change. No bloat. No silos. Just the right team, with the right tools, solving the right problems — day and night.
Certified to Deliver
Our team's commitment to excellence is validated through extensive technology certifications across leading platforms. These credentials demonstrate our continued growth mindset and prove our evolving capabilities to tackle complex challenges with cutting-edge expertise.
Examples of industry certifications:
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Google Associate Cloud Engineer | Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals Datacamp: Data Engineer Associate Splunk Core Certified User Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow Fundamentals |
What Makes OpsWerks
Managed Services Unique
Every capability we offer is rooted in a culture shaped by high-pressure, mission-critical work.
Our team is trained to solve real problems, not just surface symptoms, and our delivery model reflects that focus.
Here’s how we approach managed services differently:
🎯 Goals and Incentives Aligned to Your Success
We’re not measured by ticket volume or time spent. We succeed when you do — by solving root causes, enabling innovation, and delivering lasting impact.
📄 Transparent Pricing, Built for Partnership
Fixed, predictable pricing with no surprise invoices and no scope-creep traps. You get cost certainty and shared clarity from day one.
🌍 Resilient Team Structures
Global 24/7 coverage with built-in redundancy. We deliver consistent quality through stable, trained teams that know your environment — not a rotating cast of contractors.
🚀 Fast, Autonomous Onboarding
When one partner faced chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a full upgrade cycle in 90 days — with zero downtime. We bring the same disciplined autonomy to every engagement.
📐 Execution That Scales
You define the outcomes. We own the delivery. From runbooks to automation to stakeholder updates, we operate with confidence — so you don’t have to look over our shoulder.
Real-World Customer Impact
These examples highlight how our culture and experience empower teams to innovate and deliver:
Accelerating Time-to-Market by Two Years
For a Fortune 500 software and hardware leader, our support enabled them to fast-track their new CI/CD platform, achieving General Availability (GA) two years earlier than projected. Platform outages decreased by 10x, achieving 99% uptime, while technical debt was halved within the first six months.
Bringing 100,000+ Hosts up to Security Standards in 6 Months
A multinational consumer electronics firm, relies on critical infrastructure of over 100,000 hosts that support development platforms and essential internal applications. With mounting technical debt and the need to align with rigorous security standards, their SRE team faced a significant challenge in balancing maintenance with delivering strategic features.
Keeping Hundreds of Millions of User Connected
For a Fortune 500 customer's application accessed daily by hundreds of millions of users, we reduced critical errors significantly and dropped technical debt to impressively low levels that have been maintained consistently.
Upgrading 500+ Live Kubernetes Clusters in 90 Days
When faced with version chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a complete upgrade cycle in 90 days without major disruptions. Service disruptions from version upgrades were eliminated and mean time to recovery (MTTR) was significantly reduced.
Learn more about our impact here.
Moving Forward Together
Our promise is simple: We take care of what’s holding your team back — so they can move forward.
That’s the OpsWerks difference.
Visit opswerks.com to learn how we can help your team move forward.
A Decade Empowering World-Leading Engineering Teams
Celebrating 10 Years of solving enterprise challenges and why that matters for your team’s future.
Our Journey
Ten years ago, OpsWerks was founded on a simple but powerful belief: that great people, united by purpose and forged through strong relationships, can transform challenges into opportunities for innovation.
What began as a small, committed support team has grown into a trusted partner to some of the world’s most advanced engineering teams. Together, we’ve helped power mission-critical applications and infrastructure used by millions of people every day.
As I reflect on our butterfly logo, a symbol of growth, evolution, and transformation, I’m struck by how far we’ve come. This 10-year milestone is more than just a celebration of longevity. It’s a testament to the kind of team we’ve built, the partners who’ve trusted us, and the values that have guided us.
With the launch of OpsWerks 2.0, we’re not just marking the past — we’re stepping boldly into the future. Our newly refreshed website at opswerks.com captures more than a brand update; it reflects the experience, capabilities, and culture we’ve developed through a decade of hands-on partnership and relentless learning.
In this post, we’ll share the most important lessons we’ve learned, the challenges platform teams face today, and how our culture and services are designed to meet them.
Whether you’ve been part of our journey or are just discovering us now — welcome.
Intersection of Culture, Challenges, and Collaboration
Over the past decade, our proving ground has been the epicenter of Silicon Valley — working shoulder to shoulder with the world’s most demanding engineering teams.
When your customer’s platform supports millions of global users, when uptime is measured in microseconds, and when infrastructure decisions make or break product launches, you quickly learn what really matters: stability, speed, and trust.
At the heart of our evolution is a powerful intersection:
A culture shaped by relentless curiosity and ownership
A decade of complex, high-impact challenges
Deep collaboration with elite engineering partners
Together, these have forged the capabilities and mindset that define OpsWerks today.
We didn’t just scale our services — we grew our judgment, sharpened our execution, and built a company that understands how to create meaningful outcomes in the most complex environments.
So how did we evolve from a small support team into a trusted partner for world-leading platforms?
What have we learned by navigating some of the toughest DevOps challenges in the world?
And how do those lessons translate into solutions that empower your teams to innovate and win?
Let’s explore the journey — and the outcomes that matter.
Challenges Facing Platform Teams
Over ten years of working with the world’s top platform and infrastructure teams, we’ve seen one truth play out time and again: engineering excellence is being held back by operational noise.
Teams are under immense pressure to maintain uptime, ship features, support migrations, reduce costs, and modernize platforms — all at once. The result? Burnout, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.
Here are the most common and costly challenges we’ve seen across the industry:
🔄 Interrupt-Driven Operations
Constant incident response, often from aging, complex systems, robs engineers of rest and focus. Instead of building the future, teams are stuck firefighting the past.
🏗️ Legacy Platform Burden
Teams struggle to modernize because they’re trapped maintaining critical legacy platforms. Progress stalls as effort splits between fixing yesterday and designing tomorrow.
⚖️ Technical Debt Bottlenecks
Innovation slows when teams are stretched thin trying to deliver new features while holding together fragile, debt-laden systems. Tradeoffs become unsustainable.
👤 Attrition and Burnout
Top engineers leave when their work becomes reactive, repetitive, or misaligned with personal growth. Those who remain carry an even heavier load — until they don’t.
🔌 Misaligned Vendor Support
Fragmented outsourcing arrangements create misaligned incentives, communication gaps, and management drag — leading to more problems, not fewer.
These challenges aren’t theoretical. We’ve seen them, and solved them, at scale. The next section shares what we’ve learned about why conventional solutions fall short and what actually works.
Why Current
Approaches Fall Short
Many of the platform teams we’ve supported tried everything before finding us.
They added headcount. They brought in traditional vendors. They rewrote documentation. They built new dashboards. But the results rarely matched the effort.
The reality? Most approaches to operations and support aren’t built for innovation. They’re designed to survive, not scale.
Here’s why they fail — even with the best of intentions:
🛠️ Throwing Headcount at Noise
Hiring more engineers to handle incidents increases payroll without solving root causes. It delays tech debt reduction and traps teams in a cycle of reactivity.
🧩 Fragmented Vendor Support
Traditional outsourcing offers people, not outcomes. Engagements are scoped by time and tickets, not transformation. Teams stay busy, but not better.
🐘 Legacy Systems Never Get Retired
In-house teams stretched across support, innovation, and migration rarely have the bandwidth to decommission legacy platforms — even when modernization is a top priority.
🔄 Temporary Fixes, Permanent Fatigue
Stopgap solutions address symptoms, not systems. Engineers remain on alert. Platforms remain brittle. And innovation stalls.
After ten years in the trenches with the most demanding infrastructure teams on the planet, we’ve seen firsthand that what’s missing isn’t effort — it’s alignment:
Alignment between incentives and outcomes
Alignment between ops noise and team focus
Alignment between partner support and long-term transformation
That’s why we built OpsWerks 2.0 — to deliver a new standard of managed services that truly empowers platform teams to stabilize, scale, and innovate.
A New Approach: OpsWerks 2.0
OpsWerks 2.0 is the result of a decade of high-stakes learning, earned trust, and relentless improvement.
Born in the heart of Silicon Valley and forged alongside the world’s most demanding infrastructure teams, our approach has always focused on what matters most: empowering your best people by removing what slows them down.
We don’t replace engineering teams — we extend them. We handle the operational noise, stabilize legacy systems, and unlock your full-time teams to focus on what they do best: building, innovating, and accelerating delivery.
Capabilities That Power Your Outcomes
Our capabilities have grown dramatically — shaped by real-world complexity and sharpened by results. Here’s how we partner with some of the most sophisticated teams on the planet:
Cloud and Infrastructure
Beyond basic migrations — we deliver scalable, automated infrastructure that evolves with your business. From provisioning to cost optimization, our cloud practice ensures speed without sacrificing resilience.
Platform Operations
Full lifecycle Kubernetes management and CI/CD enablement. We streamline builds, pipelines, and environments so your developers can ship faster — with confidence and clarity.
Monitoring and Incident Response
Intelligent alerting, 24/7 global coverage, and rapid root cause resolution. Our teams don’t just respond — they communicate, coordinate, and continuously reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).
AI and Data Engineering
We build the infrastructure and data pipelines that make AI and advanced analytics possible. Scalable. Reliable. Performance-tuned for your data science and product teams.
Security and Compliance
We help you stay audit-ready with security posture management, compliance tracking, and systematic documentation — all baked into your infrastructure, not bolted on.
Managed Services that Evolve
Our outcome-driven managed services model flexes as your needs change. No bloat. No silos. Just the right team, with the right tools, solving the right problems — day and night.
Certified to Deliver
Our team's commitment to excellence is validated through extensive technology certifications across leading platforms. These credentials demonstrate our continued growth mindset and prove our evolving capabilities to tackle complex challenges with cutting-edge expertise.
Examples of industry certifications:
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Google Associate Cloud Engineer | Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals Datacamp: Data Engineer Associate Splunk Core Certified User Astronomer Certification for Apache Airflow Fundamentals |
What Makes OpsWerks
Managed Services Unique
Every capability we offer is rooted in a culture shaped by high-pressure, mission-critical work.
Our team is trained to solve real problems, not just surface symptoms, and our delivery model reflects that focus.
Here’s how we approach managed services differently:
🎯 Goals and Incentives Aligned to Your Success
We’re not measured by ticket volume or time spent. We succeed when you do — by solving root causes, enabling innovation, and delivering lasting impact.
📄 Transparent Pricing, Built for Partnership
Fixed, predictable pricing with no surprise invoices and no scope-creep traps. You get cost certainty and shared clarity from day one.
🌍 Resilient Team Structures
Global 24/7 coverage with built-in redundancy. We deliver consistent quality through stable, trained teams that know your environment — not a rotating cast of contractors.
🚀 Fast, Autonomous Onboarding
When one partner faced chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a full upgrade cycle in 90 days — with zero downtime. We bring the same disciplined autonomy to every engagement.
📐 Execution That Scales
You define the outcomes. We own the delivery. From runbooks to automation to stakeholder updates, we operate with confidence — so you don’t have to look over our shoulder.
Real-World Customer Impact
These examples highlight how our culture and experience empower teams to innovate and deliver:
Accelerating Time-to-Market by Two Years
For a Fortune 500 software and hardware leader, our support enabled them to fast-track their new CI/CD platform, achieving General Availability (GA) two years earlier than projected. Platform outages decreased by 10x, achieving 99% uptime, while technical debt was halved within the first six months.
Bringing 100,000+ Hosts up to Security Standards in 6 Months
A multinational consumer electronics firm, relies on critical infrastructure of over 100,000 hosts that support development platforms and essential internal applications. With mounting technical debt and the need to align with rigorous security standards, their SRE team faced a significant challenge in balancing maintenance with delivering strategic features.
Keeping Hundreds of Millions of User Connected
For a Fortune 500 customer's application accessed daily by hundreds of millions of users, we reduced critical errors significantly and dropped technical debt to impressively low levels that have been maintained consistently.
Upgrading 500+ Live Kubernetes Clusters in 90 Days
When faced with version chaos across 500+ Kubernetes clusters, we executed a complete upgrade cycle in 90 days without major disruptions. Service disruptions from version upgrades were eliminated and mean time to recovery (MTTR) was significantly reduced.
Learn more about our impact here.
Moving Forward Together
Our promise is simple: We take care of what’s holding your team back — so they can move forward.
That’s the OpsWerks difference.
Visit opswerks.com to learn how we can help your team move forward.