Fractional DevOps

If your team builds software and nobody owns the infrastructure, this is the arrangement most of that work gets bought under. This is fractional DevOps: you get an infrastructure engineer for the days you need one, rather than hiring one.

What this covers

Hands-on work, not advice. The usual shape of it:

• A deployment pipeline has stopped working, or never quite worked.
• An AWS environment needs building properly, in Terraform, so it can be rebuilt the same way twice.
• A Kubernetes cluster needs building, or the one you have is misbehaving.
• A migration needs running — observability tooling, on-prem to cloud, or between managed services.
• Monitoring is installed and nobody trusts what it says.

I work with Kubernetes, AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, FluxCD, GitLab CI, and the Prometheus/Grafana/Loki/Mimir observability stack. The four areas this falls across each have their own page under services.

How time is agreed

Two ways, and they’re the same work either way.

A piece at a time. You describe what needs doing. I scope it, quote a price, and agree on dates. Most work starts here.

A block of days each month. For teams where work keeps coming up, a set number of days a month, booked as you need them. Days are agreed against work, not held on standby.

I take on a limited number of engagements at a time, so dates get agreed rather than assumed. I agree on scope and cost before anything starts — no open-ended hourly meter, no minimum contract length.

Rate

£950–£1,100 per day, depending on the work. A day is 7.5 hours.

Fixed-price quotes for a defined piece of work are available and are usually the better option where the scope is clear. Where I quote a fixed price, that’s the price.

What this doesn’t include

• On-call cover, incident response guarantees, or a response-time commitment, by default. They aren’t part of this arrangement. If some on-call is part of what you need, say so at the start and I’ll tell you what I can take on.
• Day-to-day operational ownership. Your team owns and runs the systems, during the work and after it. Anything I build is handed over with documentation, not kept in my head.
• Windows servers, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, laptops, printers, phones, or general office IT. That’s a managed IT provider’s work, not mine.

If continuous cover is a strict requirement for your team, a managed service provider is likely the better choice.

If you’re not ready to hand over work

There’s a smaller way to start: a fixed-scope observability audit — a review of what telemetry you collect, whether the alerts mean anything, and what the stack costs to run. Delivered as a written report, a prioritised list of what to fix with effort estimates, worked configuration examples you can actually use, and a call to review it.

£2,500–£3,500, typically five working days, price agreed before it starts.

It suits teams that want a clear roadmap before committing to hands-on engineering work.

How to start

Get in touch with a brief outline of what you need via the contact form or email. I will schedule a short discovery call to see if it’s a good fit.

Remote by default. London on-site is available where required.