4ops

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the CEO of an information technology company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

End-to-end software development services. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire 4ops to accomplish?

• We needed to migrate from a single VPS to AWS. Manual deployments were a mess and downtime kept happening. The goal was to move everything to a stable cloud setup without breaking what worked.
• Setting up proper CI/CD was the main thing. Our team wasted too much time on manual deployments and environment issues. We wanted automated builds, testing, and safe rollbacks for staging and production.

SOLUTION

How did you find 4ops?

Online Search

Why did you select 4ops over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from 4ops were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The scope covered migrating our entire stack to AWS and building a proper DevOps process from scratch. The scope covered migrating our entire stack to AWS and building a proper DevOps process from scratch. We started with a discovery phase where they audited our existing setup and gave us a clear roadmap with priorities. 

The main block of work was infrastructure. They built everything using Terraform so it's reproducible, set up a VPC with private and public subnets, configured EC2 and RDS, and moved our services into Docker containers running on Kubernetes. Auto-scaling and load balancing were part of this, too.

After that, they focused on CI/CD. We have automated pipelines in GitLab with proper testing stages, staging, and QA environments that mirror production, and a safe rollback if something fails. Deploy time went from around 40 minutes down to under 8. 

The last big piece was observability and reliability. Prometheus and Grafana for metrics, Loki for logs, and Slack alerts that actually catch problems before users notice. They also set up automated backups and a basic disaster recovery plan.

Final deliverables were all the infrastructure code in our repo, runbooks for common incidents, monitoring dashboards, and a handover session where they walked our team through everything. They also trained two of our devs on basic ops tasks so we can handle small issues ourselves.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Deployment time was the biggest one. We used to spend around 40 minutes per release and now it's under 8. Rollbacks also became way easier and take a couple of minutes if something goes wrong. Before, a bad deploy could mean an hour of stress and manual fixes.

Uptime went from around 97% to 99.9%. Before we had random downtime almost every week and usually found out from users complaining in support chat. Now alerts come into Slack before anyone notices, and most issues are fixed before they affect customers. That changed how the whole team feels about releases.

Cloud bill dropped about 30%, which honestly we didn't expect. They cleaned up unused resources, fixed instance sizes, and set up auto-scaling properly. We were bracing for higher costs after the migration, so this was a real surprise. Over a year, it adds up to a decent chunk of money.

Our backend team got a lot of time back, maybe 15 hours a week that used to go into DevOps tasks. Onboarding new devs also became faster because of the docs and one-command environment setup. People who joined recently were productive in days instead of weeks.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

 Communication ran through Slack day to day, and all work was tracked in Jira: backlog, priorities, blockers, and progress were always visible. They were responsive within the same business day for anything urgent. Decisions were documented rather than just discussed verbally, which made it easy to bring additional stakeholders on our side up to speed when needed. They also pushed back when we suggested decisions that would have created technical debt later, which we appreciated.

What was your primary form of communication with 4ops?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They've taken full ownership from day one instead of waiting for direction. They didn't ask us to design the architecture first and then build it — they came in, designed a production-ready architecture themselves, set up the cloud infrastructure, built out the CI/CD pipelines, introduced security standards, and added cost monitoring early. Engineering, infrastructure, and delivery were aligned under one direction, which is exactly what we'd been missing. That removed the bottlenecks we'd been hitting from splitting these responsibilities across separate contractors and internal staff.

Are there any areas for improvement or something 4ops could have done differently?

Honestly, no significant complaints - the engagement has been smooth from day one. Their senior team is in high demand, so booking specific resources for tight windows requires advance planning. That's more a function of their quality than a real downside.