Make releases boring again
Deployments that are boring, incidents that are rare, and recovery that's rehearsed.
All Data & CloudFriday deploy freezes, hero-dependent releases, and incidents diagnosed by folklore — delivery pain compounds into product pain. Reliability is an engineering practice, not a personality trait of your best sysadmin.
- Deploy frequency up, change-failure rate down
- Incidents measured in minutes with blameless learning after
- Onboarding a new engineer to production in days
What the work actually involves
CI/CD pipelines
Build-test-deploy automation with gates that catch what code review misses.
Infrastructure as code
Environments reproducible from git — no more snowflake servers with secret histories.
Observability stacks
Logs, metrics, and traces unified so diagnosis takes minutes, not archaeology.
SRE practices
SLOs, error budgets, on-call design, and post-incident reviews that change things.
Release engineering
Feature flags, canary deploys, and instant rollback — shipping speed with a safety net.
Environments and secrets management
Reproducible non-production environments and credentials that live in a vault with rotation and an audit trail rather than in a pipeline variable nobody has reviewed since it was set.
Incident response and postmortems
On-call that a small team can sustain, severity definitions agreed before the first incident, and blameless postmortems whose actions are tracked rather than filed.
What you are handed.
Yours to keep, and written so another team could pick them up.
A pipeline anyone can run
Deployment stops being a person with a laptop and a runbook.
Infrastructure as code
The environment rebuildable from the repository, which is also your disaster recovery answer.
SLOs with error budgets
An agreed definition of 'reliable enough', so reliability work has a stopping point.
Incident response that runs itself
Alerting, escalation, on-call rota and blameless postmortems as a working practice.
The engagement
We do not publish prices — scope drives them. Everything else, here.
- Starts with
- A review of how code currently reaches production
- Typical duration
- 6–12 weeks
- Who you get
- Two SREs and a platform engineer
- Commercial model
- Fixed-scope build, optional retained on-call
What the answer depends on.
Two sets of conditions. Read both against your own situation — most organisations recognise themselves in one column within a sentence or two.
This is the right call when
- Releases happen at night, by hand, by one person who cannot take leave.
- Nobody can rebuild an environment from scratch with confidence.
- Incidents are diagnosed by guesswork.
A different approach fits better when
- One deploy a quarter — the machinery costs more than it saves.
- No appetite for on-call. Reliability needs someone to answer.
- You want CI/CD but not the test suite that makes it safe.
Questions about devops & reliability
Where this comes up most.
The regulatory context and the systems already in the building change the build. Each sector page says how.
If this is close to what you need but not quite it, that gap is usually the useful part of a first call — discuss this capability.