DevOps Automation Retainer

Slow, manual deployments are an engineering tax. Every week your team spends on deployment coordination, environment debugging, and incident fire-fighting is a week not spent shipping features.

I’ve helped teams move from manual, error-prone release processes to automated CI/CD pipelines that significantly reduce deployment overhead. This retainer keeps that momentum going.

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The Real Cost of Broken DevOps

Beyond the obvious frustration, broken DevOps has measurable costs:

• Engineering time — Senior engineers spending Friday afternoons on manual deploys instead of architecture work
• Incident frequency — Without proper staging parity and automated rollbacks, production incidents become routine
• Developer velocity — Long CI pipelines and flaky tests create feedback loops that slow down every PR
• Onboarding friction — New engineers take weeks to understand how to get code to production
• Cloud waste — Poorly configured pipelines spin up ephemeral environments that never get torn down

Most of these problems are solved once, correctly, and maintained — not re-solved every quarter.

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What’s Included in the Retainer

CI/CD Pipeline Engineering

Design, build, and maintain automated pipelines that go from code push to production safely.

• Multi-stage pipelines: build → test → security scan → staging → production
• Branch-based deployment rules (feature branches to ephemeral envs, main to staging, tags to production)
• Automated rollback on health check failure
• Build cache optimization for faster pipeline execution
• Secrets management via AWS Secrets Manager, GitHub Secrets, or Vault

Tooling: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, AWS CodePipeline, Docker, AWS ECR/ECS

Infrastructure as Code

Version-controlled infrastructure that can be reproduced, reviewed, and audited.

• Terraform modules for AWS resources (VPC, ECS, RDS, S3, CloudFront, ALB)
• Environment parity — staging mirrors production configuration, not a watered-down approximation
• Drift detection and remediation
• Infrastructure change review as part of the PR process

Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

Production-grade container management for teams that have outgrown simple deployments.

• EKS/self-managed Kubernetes cluster setup and hardening
• Helm chart development and management
• ArgoCD GitOps workflow implementation
• Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and resource limit tuning
• Multi-environment namespace strategy

Observability & Alerting

You can’t fix what you can’t see.

• Prometheus + Grafana stack for infrastructure and application metrics
• OpenTelemetry instrumentation for distributed tracing
• CloudWatch dashboards and log insights for AWS-native visibility
• Alert routing — critical pages on-call, warnings to Slack, not everything is a page
• Runbook documentation for common incident patterns

Ongoing Maintenance

The retainer covers the work that keeps the pipes clean:

• Dependency and base image updates (security patches)
• Pipeline performance optimization as codebase grows
• New service onboarding to existing CI/CD standards
• Incident post-mortems and pipeline improvements
• Monthly DevOps health report

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One-Time Setups (Non-Retainer Option)

Not ready for a retainer? I offer fixed-scope setup engagements:

• CI/CD Pipeline Setup — Single project, one pipeline, deployed and documented. 1–2 week delivery.
• Full DevOps Bootstrap — CI/CD + IaC + monitoring stack for a new product or team. 3–5 week delivery.
• Kubernetes Migration — Moving from ECS or bare EC2 to Kubernetes with zero-downtime cutover plan.

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Proven Results

• Deployment automation — Multiple clients moved from bi-weekly manual releases to automated same-day deployments using GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD
• Incident reduction — Automated testing and staging environment parity reduced production deployment issues
• Automated pipelines — Built CI/CD workflows for projects at G2Academy, using GitHub Actions and Jenkins
• Zero-downtime deployments — ECS blue-green deployments for financial services client during business hours

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Retainer Options

• Starter Retainer — 20 hours/month. Covers one active project: pipeline maintenance, dependency updates, and incident support. Best for small teams with a stable, working pipeline.

• Growth Retainer — 40 hours/month. Covers 2–3 services: active pipeline development, IaC management, observability improvements, and new service onboarding.

• Scale Retainer — 80 hours/month. Full DevOps engineering support: Kubernetes management, multi-environment IaC, on-call escalation support, and quarterly architecture review.

Minimum engagement: 3 months. All retainers include a monthly written summary of work done, changes deployed, and upcoming recommendations.

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Who This Is For

• Engineering teams shipping features but spending too much time on deployment coordination
• CTOs who want a senior DevOps engineer without a full-time hire
• Startups that have outgrown Heroku or Render and need proper AWS infrastructure
• Teams preparing to scale and needing CI/CD before the next growth push
• Companies with cloud costs growing faster than their user base (pipeline inefficiency is often a hidden factor)

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Why Work With Me

• Former AWS Authorized Instructor (2022–2025) — I understand AWS infrastructure at the level needed to build pipelines that stay cost-efficient
• 5 AWS certifications achieved — including SysOps Administrator, covering operational reliability
• 10+ years of production systems — I’ve seen what breaks at scale and designed pipelines that don’t
• Backend engineer by background — I write infrastructure code with the same standards as application code: readable, tested, documented
• Async-first — detailed written handoffs, documented decisions, no knowledge hoarding

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Next Step

Tell me: how many services do you have, how often do you deploy today, and what’s the biggest pain point in your current process? I’ll come back with a realistic scope for where to start.

Contact: toni@kusnandar.dev or LinkedIn