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DevOps Retainer & Cost Optimization

Your DevOps team without the full-time cost. Monthly engagement covering on-call support, incident response, infrastructure maintenance, and cloud cost reduction.

Why a retainer?

No hiring overhead

Skip the 3-6 month hiring process. Experienced DevOps expertise available immediately.

Predictable cost

Fixed monthly fee. No surprise overtime, no benefits, no equity. Scale up or down as needed.

Team continuity

We document everything. No knowledge lost when an employee leaves. Runbooks for every operation.

Proactive, not reactive

We monitor your infrastructure continuously. Issues get fixed before they page your team at 3am.

Retainer includes

Priority Slack channel with < 1hr response time (business hours)
24/7 on-call for P1 incidents (optional add-on)
Monthly infrastructure review & improvement sprint
Proactive cost monitoring & rightsizing recommendations
Security patching: node upgrades, dependency updates
Kubernetes version upgrades (no surprises)
New service onboarding to existing infrastructure
Pipeline updates and improvements
Monthly report: cost, performance, incidents, recommendations
Runbook updates as infrastructure evolves

Cost optimization includes

Full AWS cost breakdown by service, team, and environment
EC2 / RDS / EKS node rightsizing analysis
Reserved Instance & Savings Plans recommendation
Spot instance migration for non-critical workloads
Idle resource identification and cleanup
S3 lifecycle policy optimization
Data transfer cost reduction
Cost tagging strategy and enforcement
Budget alerts and anomaly detection
Monthly cost reporting dashboard in Grafana

Questions

Is a retainer better than hiring a full-time DevOps engineer?

For most startups and scale-ups: yes. A full-time hire means salary, benefits, equity, and recruiting overhead. A retainer gives you equivalent senior expertise at lower total cost, with no hiring risk.

What's the minimum commitment?

3 months. It takes time to learn your infrastructure properly and start delivering proactive improvements. We don't do one-month engagements.

What if we have a P1 incident at 2am?

24/7 on-call is an optional add-on to the retainer. We'll define SLAs, escalation paths, and incident runbooks together. You choose the coverage level.

How do you handle cost optimization ROI?

Most clients see the retainer fee paid back in AWS cost savings within the first 2-3 months. We track savings monthly and include it in your report.

Ready for a DevOps partner?

Book a call. We'll review your infrastructure and estimate what a retainer would save you per month.

Book Discovery Call