Congratulations!! After 3 months of hard work, your developer has done an incredible job and your brand new web application is ready to be put online. But wait a minute… Who is going to put it online?

Recruiting a DevOps takes up to 10 months [...]

Try to ask your developer to do it - there is a good chance that he can’t. Why? Deploying applications is not necessarily a part of their qualifications. And even if he is able to, who's going to make sure it's always available and scale as your business grows?

Companies are all too familiar with this situation, which is why they start looking at hiring highly qualified and expensive DevOps engineers. But does your company really need to hire a DevOps specialist? Unless you're the next Google or Facebook, chances are you don’t need to.

Recruiting a DevOps takes up to 10 months, it takes another 3 to 6 months to get the job up and running, and of course, you have to pay for all that time. They are even 20% more expensive than software developers.

So, what are the alternatives to recruiting a DevOps in 2020?

5 alternatives to hiring a DevOps engineer

First of all, if you think that Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Azure belong to the alternatives of hiring a DevOps engineer, then you're wrong. These services are not simple. They require system and networking skills. Moreover, these Cloud providers are proposing that you pass certifications in order to make the best use of their services.

Heroku

Heroku is a PaaS (Platform as a Service), which was created in 2007 by Tod Nielsen and acquired by Salesforce in 2010. Heroku has been a leading platform for a very long time, but since the acquisition by Salesforce, it has changed very little and is being overtaken by the competition. Also, like all PaaS, you are limited by the choice of language and compatible versions. This is a great alternative to hiring a DevOps engineer if your needs are not too complicated. Otherwise, pay attention to your bill.

Advantages:

• Easy to use for a beginner
• Tons of add-ons (database, firewall, brokers…)
• Free tier
  

Disadvantages:

• Very expensive (and it’s even worse if you add add-ons)
• Limited support of staging and features environments
• Limited support for teamwork
• Do not support micro services
• Not evolving at all
  

Note: there are a lot of PaaS alternatives to Heroku which are very similar but are cheaper.

Zeit

Zeit is a platform for static sites. Its simplicity is truly exemplary and is one of the favorite tools that web developers use. On the other hand, you can forget about deploying web applications with a database because it is near impossible. If your business is to release web applications and consume third API services, then Zeit is probably your best alternative to a DevOps engineer!

Advantages:

• Very easy to use
• Support all majors frontend frameworks
• Support of teamwork
• Free tier and cost effective
  

Disadvantages:

• Do not support database
• No staging and features environments
• Do not support micro services

Cloud Run

Cloud Run has been made to simplify the deployment of container application on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The developer experience with the CLI is good, but you still need to do prerequisite actions to make it work seamlessly with your environment.

Advantages:

• Language agnostic
• Support of teamwork
• Free tier
  

Disadvantages:

• Database is not first class citizen
• No staging and features environments

Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk has been made to simplify the deployment of container applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is the equivalent of Cloud Run but for AWS.

Advantages:

• Language agnostic
• Support of teamwork
• Free tier
  

Disadvantages:

• Poor developer experience
• Database is not first class citizen
• No staging and features environments

Qovery

Qovery is a platform for modern applications. It is the next generation enterprise-grade platform for deploying web applications. The developer needs to deploy a NodeJS application + PostgreSQL database? No problem. Does he need to work with colleagues in multiple staging environments? No problem. Does he even need to program in Cobol? Once again, it’s not a problem.

Advantages:

• Easy to use
• Language agnostic
• Support database as a first class citizen
• Support of teamwork
• Support micro services
• Free community plan
  

Disadvantages:

• Designed for professional developers
  

If you recognize yourself in this pain, let us know, we will be more than happy to spend time with you discussing how we can help.

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