DevOps & CI/CD

DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations, enabling faster, more reliable software delivery. Alchemilla Ventures provides DevOps consulting and implementation services that transform how your teams build, test, and deploy software — with DevOps engineers.

Beyond Tools — DevOps as Culture

DevOps is not just Jenkins and Docker. It’s a cultural shift toward shared ownership, automation, measurement, and continuous improvement. Our DevOps consultants focus on people and process first, then apply the right tools to accelerate your delivery pipeline. We’ve transformed delivery for startups (from monthly to multiple daily deployments) and enterprises (from 6-month release cycles to bi-weekly).

Our DevOps & CI/CD Services

• DevOps Assessment & Strategy: We begin with a DevOps maturity assessment using the DORA metrics framework — Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and Change Failure Rate. Our consultants interview your development, QA, and operations teams to understand current pain points. The output is a DevOps transformation roadmap with prioritised initiatives and measurable targets.

• CI/CD Pipeline Implementation: End-to-end automated pipelines:

• Source Control: Git workflows (GitHub Flow, GitLab Flow, trunk-based development), branch protection rules, code ownership, and pre-commit hooks.

• Build Automation: Multi-stage Docker builds, dependency caching, parallel test execution, and build artifact management (Nexus, Artifactory, GitHub Packages).

• Automated Testing: Unit tests (Jest, pytest, JUnit), integration tests, end-to-end tests (Playwright, Cypress), security scans (Trivy, Snyk, SonarQube), and licence compliance checks — all in CI.

• Deployment Automation: Blue-green deployments, canary releases, feature flags (LaunchDarkly, Unleash), and automated rollback for failed deployments.

• Pipeline as Code: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins (declarative pipeline), or Azure DevOps pipelines — version-controlled, reviewable, and auditable.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Manage infrastructure with code, not clicks:

• Terraform/Terragrunt: Provision cloud resources (AWS, Azure, GCP) with reusable modules, remote state management, and drift detection. Our team manages hundreds of Terraform modules across client environments.

• Pulumi: Infrastructure as code using familiar programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Go) — preferred by development teams.

• Ansible: Configuration management for servers — hardening, package installation, service configuration, and application deployment.

• AWS CDK / CDKTF: Define cloud infrastructure using TypeScript or Python with the AWS CDK, bringing object-oriented patterns to infrastructure definition.

• Containerisation & Orchestration: We containerise applications and manage orchestration:

• Docker: Multi-stage builds, image optimisation, security scanning, and registry management

• Kubernetes: Cluster design, deployment (EKS, AKS, GKE, or on-premise), workload configuration (Deployments, StatefulSets, Jobs), and service exposure (Ingress, LoadBalancer)

• Helm: Kubernetes package management — templated, reusable charts for consistent deployments across environments

• Service Mesh: Istio or Linkerd for mutual TLS, traffic splitting, circuit breaking, and observability

• Observability & Monitoring: Full-stack visibility into your applications and infrastructure:

• Metrics: Prometheus + Grafana for dashboards, RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration), and SLO-based alerting with Alertmanager

• Logging: Centralised log aggregation with Loki, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and Fluentd — structured JSON logging with trace correlation

• Tracing: Distributed tracing with Jaeger or Grafana Tempo, OpenTelemetry instrumentation for automatic correlation between services

• Synthetic Monitoring: Blackbox monitoring with Grafana Cloud, Checkly, or Uptime Kuma — simulating user journeys and alerting on failures

• Error Tracking: Sentry or Rollbar for application error grouping, alerting, and release health tracking

• Cloud-Native DevOps: DevOps practices optimised for cloud platforms:

• AWS: CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, ECS/EKS, Lambda, CloudFormation/CDK

• Azure: Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, AKS, Container Apps, Bicep

• GCP: Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, GKE, Cloud Run, Deployment Manager

• DevSecOps: Security integrated into every stage of the pipeline — not bolted on at the end:

• Pre-commit: Secrets scanning (Gitleaks, TruffleHog), SAST (Semgrep, SonarQube)

• Build: Dependency scanning (Snyk, Dependabot), container image scanning (Trivy, Grype)

• Test: DAST (OWASP ZAP), security-focused integration tests

• Deploy: Policy-as-code (OPA, Kyverno), admission control, signed images (Cosign)

• Runtime: Runtime security (Falco), network policies, vulnerability management

DevOps Maturity Model

Level	Deployment Frequency	Lead Time	MTTR	Change Failure Rate
Manual	Monthly+	Months	Days	45%+
Automated Build	Weekly	Weeks	Days	30%
CI/CD Pipeline	Daily	Hours	Hours	15%
Full DevOps	On-demand	Minutes	Minutes	<5%

Tools We Standardise On

Category	Primary	Alternative
CI/CD	GitHub Actions, GitLab CI	Jenkins, Azure DevOps, CircleCI
IaC	Terraform, Ansible	Pulumi, AWS CDK, Crossplane
Containers	Docker, Kubernetes	Podman, Nomad
Monitoring	Prometheus, Grafana, Loki	Datadog, New Relic, ELK
Secrets	HashiCorp Vault, SOPS	AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault
GitOps	ArgoCD, Flux CD	Spinnaker, Jenkins X

Accelerate your software delivery with our DevOps team. Contact us for a DevOps maturity assessment and transformation roadmap.