DevOps consulting that makes shipping boring again.
From brittle bash scripts to bulletproof delivery pipelines. We engineer CI/CD systems, Kubernetes platforms, and Infrastructure as Code that turn deploys into a non-event.
InfraZen Technologies builds CI/CD, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, GitOps and developer platforms as one delivery system, not six tools. Week one is a read-only audit, then every change lands as a pull request your team reviews. A CI/CD rebuild typically takes 4–6 weeks; a full Kubernetes platform with GitOps, 10–16 weeks. Your team owns the result after handover.
Key takeaways
- CI/CD, Kubernetes, IaC, GitOps and developer platforms are one delivery system — we build them as one system, not six tools.
- The job is transfer, not dependency: pipelines and platforms your team owns after we leave, documented in writing and paired into your engineers.
- Week one is a read-only audit — most delivery pain traces to drift, snowflake environments and untested deploy paths, not to the CI tool on the label.
- Typical shapes: CI/CD rebuild 4–6 weeks; full Kubernetes platform with GitOps 10–16 weeks. Runbooks, architecture docs and pairing sessions are deliverables, not extras.
What does a DevOps consultant do?
A DevOps consultant designs, builds, and hands over the delivery machinery your product runs on: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, Kubernetes platforms, deployment automation, and the observability wired to releases. The good ones engineer themselves out of the critical path; the bad ones become a staffing line you can't cancel. Everything on this page is scoped toward the first outcome.
Week one is a read-only audit. We read your pipeline configs, your Terraform state, your deploy history and your incident channel before we touch anything — because the call usually comes after a run of bad release days, and the cause is rarely the CI tool on the label. It is almost always state: drift between environments, secrets handled by hand, a deploy path that works only when one specific person runs it. The audit ends in a written findings doc with the fixes ranked by risk-reduction per week of effort.
From there the engagement ships in reviewable increments — every change lands as a pull request your team reviews, not a mystery branch we merge on the way out. What you hold at the end is concrete: pipelines with explicit gates, infrastructure that rebuilds from code, runbooks someone other than us has executed, and DORA metrics reported out of the pipeline itself so the improvement is measurable rather than asserted. Our DORA metrics guide explains what each of the five measures.
The full DevOps toolkit.
CI/CD pipelines
Pipelines that fail fast, test thoroughly, and deploy predictably. We work across GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, and ArgoCD Workflows.
- Multi-stage pipelines with parallel test sharding
- Signed artifacts, SBOMs, and supply-chain security
- Blue/green, canary, and feature-flag rollouts
- Automated rollback and promotion gates
Kubernetes & container platforms
Production-grade Kubernetes clusters designed for scale, cost, and security. From first pod to multi-region fleets.
- EKS, GKE, AKS, and self-managed cluster design
- Ingress, service mesh, and traffic management
- Autoscaling (HPA, VPA, Karpenter, cluster autoscaler)
- Multi-tenancy, namespace policies, and RBAC
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi modules that are modular, reviewable, and drift-resistant. No more clickops.
- Module design, versioning, and registries
- State management, drift detection, and policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel)
- Multi-account & multi-region environment patterns
- Import of existing clickops infrastructure
GitOps delivery
ArgoCD and Flux-based delivery that makes Git the single source of truth for your entire environment: apps, config, and policy. Full scope on the GitOps consulting page.
- ArgoCD ApplicationSet and Flux Kustomize design
- Progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts or Flagger
- Secrets management with Sealed Secrets, External Secrets, or SOPS
- Cluster bootstrap and add-on management
Developer platforms (IDP)
Internal developer portals and golden paths that let product teams ship without filing DevOps tickets. Built on Backstage, Port, or custom.
- Service catalog and templated project scaffolding
- Self-service environments and ephemeral previews
- Paved roads for the 80% of common use cases
- Metrics on developer experience (DORA, SPACE)
Secrets & supply chain
Secret management and supply-chain hardening that survive audit and compromise scenarios alike.
- Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager
- OIDC federation for CI/CD (no long-lived keys)
- SLSA levels, sigstore/cosign, and SBOM generation
- Dependency and container scanning in CI
A reference CI/CD architecture we build
Tools change from client to client. The spine does not: one artifact per commit, proven by gates, signed, then promoted — never rebuilt — from staging to production.
| Stage | What runs | Gate to pass |
|---|---|---|
| Pull request | Build, unit tests, a Terraform plan on the PR, a preview environment | Green checks and a human review |
| Merge to main | One immutable image, tagged with the commit SHA; integration tests | Tests pass against real dependencies |
| Scan & sign | SAST, dependency and image scans; SBOM; signature and provenance | No critical finding without a time-boxed exception |
| Staging | GitOps sync of the new digest; smoke tests; a deploy marker in your APM | Smoke tests pass, error rate holds |
| Production | Canary or blue/green, analysed against latency and error-rate SLOs | SLO burn stays in budget, or it reverts itself |
Gates are policy, not opinion: failing one fails the pipeline, and there is no approval step that always gets clicked through.
Promotion is a pull request
Environments live in Git. Promoting a release is a reviewed change to the image digest, and Argo CD or Flux reconciles the cluster to match. Nobody deploys from a laptop; the audit trail is the Git log.
Rollback is designed, not improvised
The previous artifact still exists and the previous state is a commit, so rollback is a revert — and with progressive delivery, usually an automatic one. The part teams forget is the database: schema changes ship expand-then-contract, so the old version still runs against the new schema.
Supply-chain signing closes the loop
CI reaches your cloud through OIDC federation, with no long-lived keys to leak. Images are signed with cosign, the SBOM travels with them, and an admission policy refuses anything unsigned — so the pipeline you can audit is the only path to production.
Platform maturity: where teams usually are
Name the stage honestly; the next move differs at each one. Skipping a stage — a developer portal on top of hand-built environments — is the most expensive mistake here.
| Stage | What it looks like | The next move |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Manual | Console changes, deploys run by one person, a wiki of steps | Infrastructure in code, deploys in CI, even crudely |
| 2 · Scripted | CI builds and a deploy script; environments drift, secrets sit in CI variables | Import the drift into Terraform; add gates and OIDC |
| 3 · Automated | IaC and gated pipelines, but releases are pushed and rollback is manual | GitOps, progressive delivery, DORA metrics |
| 4 · Platform | Golden paths, self-service environments, delivery metrics reviewed like product metrics | Keep the road paved: upgrade, deprecate, listen to users |
Internal platforms that stall usually got the portal before the paved road. More on why developers bypass the IDP and what platform engineering is.
To place your own team, score it with the free DevOps maturity assessment (18 questions across six areas, run in your browser), or work through the 30-point DevOps readiness checklist and count only what you can prove.
What the first 30 days look like.
Measure first, then ship in pull requests your team reviews.
- 01
Read-only audit
We read pipeline configs, Terraform state, deploy history and the incident channel, and change nothing. Findings arrive in writing, ranked by risk-reduction per week of effort.
week 1: read-only - 02
Paired delivery
The top fixes land as pull requests paired with your engineers — usually the deploy path only one person can run, and secrets handled by hand.
weeks 2–3: pull requests - 03
Baseline
DORA metrics start reporting from the pipeline, so every later milestone is measured rather than asserted.
week 4: baseline
When you should not hire a DevOps consultancy
A first call can end with us advising against any engagement. Five reasons it would:
- No production traffic yet. Before product-market fit, a managed platform and one simple pipeline are enough.
- The work is a function, not a project. A built platform that needs owning every day needs a hire — or managed DevOps.
- You want a tool, not a practice. Kubernetes for a handful of services a managed container runtime would run well is cost without return.
- Nobody can own the result. Handover needs an engineer to pair with; without one, what we build decays.
- The blocker is approval, not automation. If every release waits on a change board, a faster pipeline only queues faster.
Consultants or another in-house hire?
Honest answer: it depends on whether the work is a project or a function. The short version:
| Consulting engagement | In-house hire | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to start | Days to weeks | Months of hiring, plus ramp |
| Cost shape | Fixed scope, defined end | Permanent payroll, whatever the backlog |
| Breadth | Patterns from many production estates | Deep context on yours, over time |
| Knowledge transfer | Built into the engagement (pairing, docs) | Walks out the door if they leave |
| Pager | Yours after handover (or ours, under managed DevOps) | Theirs, on day one |
| Fits best when | A platform needs building or fixing | A built platform needs owning |
The full argument, with the cost math for both models, is in managed DevOps vs in-house. Where your rates land is in DevOps consulting rates.
Your tools, not ours.
We work in the stack you already run. A tool change comes with a migration plan, never for its own sake.
| typical duration | CI/CD rebuild 4–6 weeks · full Kubernetes platform with GitOps 10–16 weeks |
|---|---|
| engagement models | strategic advisory · project delivery · managed devops & sre |
| what you get in writing | runbooks, architecture docs, and pairing sessions with your team |
| tooling stance | we work with your existing CI/CD; changes come with a migration plan, never rip-and-replace |
What that looks like in production.
A representative engagement, anonymised at the client's request; the numbers are the ones we measured. Read the EKS migration engagement →
Common questions.
How long does a typical DevOps engagement take?
Most engagements run 4–16 weeks depending on scope. A CI/CD pipeline rebuild is typically 4–6 weeks. A full Kubernetes platform build with GitOps is 10–16 weeks. We scope honestly and give you a timeline before work starts.
Do you work with our existing CI/CD tools or replace them?
We work with whatever you have: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, ArgoCD. If a tool change would save you significant pain, we'll recommend it with a migration plan, but we never rip-and-replace for the sake of it.
Can you work alongside our in-house DevOps team?
Yes, and we prefer it. Our goal is to upskill your team, not create dependency. We pair-program, review PRs, and run knowledge-transfer sessions so your engineers own the result after we leave.
Is AI replacing DevOps?
No. It is compressing the toil out of it. Assistants now write much of the pipeline YAML and the Terraform, which moves the leverage to whoever can review, constrain, and operate what gets generated. The teams shipping fastest in 2026 pair assistants with the guardrails on this page; the incidents we get called into increasingly trace to generated changes nobody reviewed.
$ infrazen book --review
Ready to make deploys boring?
Book a free 30-minute DevOps audit. We'll look at your pipelines, your infra code, and tell you honestly what's worth fixing first.