In an era where efficiency and agility are key to staying competitive, implementing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) can make or break your software development lifecycle (SDLC). But building and maintaining a robust CI/CD pipeline in-house can be a massive drain on resources. This is where opting for CI/CD as a managed service can offer significant advantages.
The complexity of the market
This is the current state of the CI/CD market with most of the major players. There are many smaller ones, profiled in solving specific problems. It is a saturated market that is hard to navigate as all of those platforms have a lot to offer.
Choosing the right tools and licenses is already a challenge enough. Let's look into the financial aspects.
Labor costs
In Sydney, DevOps engineers command salaries ranging from $145k to $200k annually.
In Melbourne, the range is $130k to $200k.
In Brisbane, you’re looking at $120k to $160k.
Employing in-house engineers costs significantly, and you would need at least two for resiliency and to ensure your CI/CD pipelines remain functional. Additionally, should you opt to make this a task for your developers, bear in mind that many may lack the necessary infrastructure expertise, thus potentially slowing down your development cycles.
Tooling Expenses
Next, let’s delve into the cost of licensing tools. To simplify, we’ll look at a relatively small R&D team of 30 people:
TeamCity: $3,700 for the first year and $1,850 for each subsequent year for a Professional license (excluding infrastructure).
Octopus Deploy: Pricing varies, with renewal quotes ranging from $12,000 to $30,000 per year.
GitLab: $15,400 annually for that size.
Jenkins: Free to use but has limitations, requiring additional tools with licenses to fill the gaps and some hard limitations could be a roadblock.
Infrastructure Costs
These tools need to be hosted, and infrastructure maintenance can be cumbersome:
Two 8-core VMs on Azure that support heavy CPU usage will cost around $12,000 annually.
Additionally, let's consider a hidden cost of $4,000 for your infrastructure team to manage these servers.
Summing Up In-House Costs
For a 30-person R&D department:
Labor: Approximately $300,000 per year for two engineers.
Licensing: Approximately $20,000 per year.
Infrastructure: Approximately $16,000 per year.
Total: $336,000 annually.
This budget doesn't even factor in senior personnel, meaning it could take 2-3 years for your pipeline to perform at an acceptable level. Moreover, using different tools for various CI/CD tasks introduces inefficiencies.
The Managed Service Advantage
What if someone could jump-start this process for you? This is where managed services like OneRingCI come into play.
Benefits of Managed CI/CD Service
Consolidation: We’ve integrated the best tools into a single platform, eliminating inefficiencies and gaps between build, deploy, and source control tasks.
Speed: Our platform can build an MVP in a couple of weeks and conduct end-to-end testing in a few more.
Cost-Effectiveness: Our service costs less than $80k for the first year and drops to less than $30k annually afterward (depends on complexity; average value based on past implementations resembling the 30 people example R&D).
Expertise: We stay involved in your SDLC until everything runs smoothly, bringing extensive experience working with all relevant tools.
Valuable IP: By creating a CI/CD system through us, you accumulate valuable intellectual property, showcasing your organization’s maturity.
Lower Burn Rate: With reduced expenses, your burn rate decreases, making your organization more attractive to potential investors.
Conclusion
Implementing CI/CD as a managed service isn’t just a cost-saving measure — it’s a strategic investment in productivity and capability. With managed services, you gain expert support, reduced overheads, and a streamlined, efficient development process, ensuring your team can focus on what they do best: creating outstanding software. Choose OneRingCI to unlock these benefits and push your SDLC to new heights.
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