Service Definition: DevOps-as-a-Service
DevOps-as-a-Service (DOaaS) is a scalable Infrastructure & Operations service for SaaS companies that complements your Development team or expands your DevOps capabilities. At a fixed monthly price, we provide continuous platform improvements, full operational coverage, support and proactive optimisation of your cloud platform.
What’s included
DOaaS covers the full lifecycle of your cloud platform. The complete service and technology catalog is available at Skyscrapers Services. In summary:
- Managed platform & technology: We deploy and maintain a production-ready Kubernetes platform based on our Platform Blueprint, continuously updated so you never fall behind. We also manage custom technology components (databases, queues, etc.) in your environment. All infrastructure is codified in version-controlled repositories following IaC best practices.
- Operational support & incident management: We monitor your platform and respond to infrastructure incidents. For production, critical alerts go through our 24/7 on-call escalation. For non-production, alerts are handled best-effort during business hours. Your team has direct access to our engineers through Slack and GitHub. See the Support Process and Platform & Application Responsibility Definitions for details.
- Proactive services: Guidance and advice on DevOps topics is included without limits: architecture, AWS services, Kubernetes, CI/CD, cost optimisation and more. This includes architectural advice, pull request code reviews for your IaC changes, and regular cost analysis with optimisation recommendations.
- Customer Lead: Dedicated account management and regular touchpoints to ensure quality of delivery. See the Cooperation model below for details.
- Backup & restore: Encrypted, scheduled backups of in-scope data stores with manual in-place restores during business hours. See the Backups reference for scope and limitations. For cross-region resilience, coordinated runbooks and 24/7 DR standby, see our DR/BC add-on.
Add-on services
DOaaS can be extended with add-on services:
- Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: DR/BC scoping, implementation, recurring testing and optional 24/7 DR standby (service definition)
- Embedded Engineer: application-level DevOps support including CI/CD pipeline development, deployment management, performance tuning and application observability
How we engage
The start of a DOaaS engagement follows a proven three-phase approach:
1. Platform Exploration
We review your existing SaaS platform and workloads from all DevOps and cloud-native perspectives. The result is a detailed report with attention points, a proposed migration plan and opportunities for improvement.
2. Onboarding Track
An end-to-end project where we set up the cloud foundation, help containerise your applications, deploy the platform, train your team and support the migration of application workloads.
3. Start of DevOps-as-a-Service
With the first production workload live, the ongoing cooperation begins: continuous platform management, operational support and proactive services.
Offboarding
There is no lock-in. Everything is deployed in your own cloud accounts and you retain full IP rights to all customer-specific infrastructure code. When you decide to end the cooperation, we co-create a hand-over plan and transfer operational control to you.
Cooperation model
The day-to-day cooperation is supported by:
| Channel | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Dedicated Customer Lead | Your named technical account manager, responsible for knowing your environment and ensuring quality of delivery |
| Slack | Shared channel for direct, low-friction communication between both teams |
| GitHub | Work tracking through issues, infrastructure-as-code repositories and shared documentation |
| Status calls | Regular sync meetings for delivery status, roadmap alignment and technical topics |
| Account meetings | Half-yearly strategic review of the cooperation and the way forward |
For details on who in your team interacts with Skyscrapers and how, see Platform Users and User Roles.
Platform maintenance
As part of DOaaS, we continuously roll out improvements (upgrades, updates, bug fixes and new features). The impact on your workloads varies by improvement type:
| Type | Description | Expected impact |
|---|---|---|
| Add-ons (non-breaking) | Improvements with no impact on cluster usage or application behaviour. Rolled out automatically; you are informed during the update. | No impact |
| Add-ons (non-breaking but disruptive) | May cause temporary unavailability of platform features (monitoring, logging, dashboards) but do not impact application workloads. Rolled out automatically; you are informed before and during updates on production clusters. | No impact on applications |
| Add-ons (breaking) | May require changes or intervention by you before rollout. We reach out to discuss what’s needed and how the improvement will be validated. | Potential minimal planned downtime |
| Cluster improvements | Low-frequency changes to cluster foundations, usually involving rolling node updates. Rolled out automatically; you are informed during updates. | No impact for cluster-aware workloads; minimal downtime for others |
| Cluster improvements (breaking) | Major cluster changes that may require intervention or validation by you before rollout. We reach out to discuss what’s needed and coordinate the rollout together. | Potential minimal planned downtime |
Responsibilities
We manage the platform; you manage your applications: you build it, you ship it, you manage it. You can always reach out to us (including 24/7 for production with the appropriate SLA) for help with debugging, troubleshooting and platform-related investigation.
For the full responsibility breakdown, see the Shared Responsibility Model and Platform & Application Responsibility Definitions.
What’s not included
The following work falls outside the standard DOaaS scope and can be engaged separately (time & material or fixed price):
- Load and stress testing
- Security audits
- Data migrations
- Private workshops and tailored training sessions
- Service and workload packaging (containerisation and deployment configuration)
- Custom engineering beyond the standard platform scope (bespoke integrations, non-standard architectures, complex migration projects)
- White glove deployments of technologies not part of the Platform Blueprint