Birmingham SaaS scale-up shipping weekly
A product team moving from manual FTP deploys to a pipeline with test gates and canary rollout, cutting the number of Friday-afternoon rollbacks close to zero.
DevOps as a Service: CI/CD & Monitoring
DevOps services · United Kingdom
DevOps as a service for UK teams who want a working CI/CD pipeline and real observability without hiring a platform engineer. We host your GitHub Actions or GitLab CI runners, wire up Grafana, Prometheus and Loki, and set SLO-based alerting that routes to the right person, not a channel nobody reads. Included DevOps hours cover the ongoing tuning, not just the initial set-up.
- Pipelines, runners and dashboards run for you
- SLO-based alerting, not noisy thresholds
- DevOps hours included every month
- VPS 1–8 h/month; dedicated 5–10 h/month depending on plan; GPU 10 h/monthIncluded hours
- Frankfurt, in the EUData centre
- Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and Tempo hosted for youObservability stack
- EUR invoicing, 20% UK VAT itemisedBilling
01
What we set up and run
We build the pipeline as code, with branch protection and test gates that actually block a bad merge, then connect it to blue-green or canary deployment so a release ships without a maintenance window. Alongside it we run Grafana, Prometheus and Loki for metrics and logs, plus Tempo for tracing where it's worth the overhead, and we write the on-call runbooks your team follows when an alert fires at 2am.
- Pipeline as code with branch protection and required test gates
- Self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions or GitLab CI
- GitOps-style deploys tied into blue-green or canary rollouts
- Dashboards and alerting rules tuned to your real SLOs
02
Best practices we apply
Most CI/CD failures we're called in to fix are process failures, not tooling failures — no test gate, secrets in the repo, alerts nobody trusts. We apply the same operational checklist on every pipeline and monitoring stack we set up, and it's the one thing that keeps a release process from quietly rotting six months after launch. We review the checklist against your actual pipeline whenever you book included DevOps hours, not only at the initial setup.
- Pipeline as code with branch protection and test gates
- Artifact signing and a software bill of materials (SBOM) per build
- Secrets kept out of the repository, in a dedicated secrets store
- GitOps-style deploys, with the cluster state matching git, not manual edits
- SLOs and error budgets with alert routing that reaches the right person
03
From runner to on-call runbook
A CI/CD pipeline that ships code but leaves you blind once it's live isn't finished. We pair every pipeline with the monitoring it needs: dashboards that show the metrics your team actually checks, alerting rules tied to SLOs rather than arbitrary CPU thresholds, and runbooks that tell whoever is on call what to check first. This is the gap between the tutorials that show you how to install GitLab CI and an operation your team can trust at 2am.
04
How the included hours work
DevOps hours come with the plan: 1–8 hours a month on VPS tiers, 5–10 hours a month on dedicated servers depending on the plan, 10 hours a month on GPU servers. Use them for pipeline changes, a new alerting rule, a runbook update, or an investigation into a noisy dashboard, requested from the client panel under DevOps Services. Hours don't roll over, so ongoing tuning — the part most providers skip — actually happens month to month instead of being a one-off set-up fee.
How we work
Request the work from the panel
You describe your current pipeline or monitoring gap, and propose a deadline that fits your release schedule, under DevOps Services.
We scope the pipeline and dashboards
We confirm the runner set-up, deployment strategy and which SLOs matter enough to alert on, against the hours in your plan.
We build and test the alerting path
We wire up the pipeline and dashboards, then trigger a test alert end to end to confirm it actually reaches someone.
We hand over with runbooks
You receive the pipeline configuration, the dashboard set, and the on-call runbook for the alerts most likely to fire.
Use cases
Cardiff agency running client infrastructure
A DevOps-focused agency needs shared Grafana dashboards and per-client alerting so an incident on one client's stack doesn't get lost in a single noisy channel.
Early-stage London startup pre-seed
A two-engineer team needs a working CI/CD pipeline and basic monitoring without hiring a platform engineer, using the included hours instead of a full-time hire.
Technology stack
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Loki
- Tempo
- Argo CD
Every subscription includes monthly DevOps, CyberSecurity and Programming hours: 1 h from the cPanel Advanced plan up, 1–8 h on VPS, 5–10 h on dedicated servers depending on the plan, and 10 h on GPU servers. Hours are requested from your client panel, don't roll over to the next month, and anything above the quota is accepted and billed separately.
Frequently asked questions
What does DevOps as a service actually include?
In our case: the pipeline set-up and runner hosting, the Grafana/Prometheus/Loki observability stack, alerting tied to SLOs, and ongoing changes through the monthly DevOps hours in your plan — not a one-off consulting engagement that leaves you to run it alone afterwards.
Can I self-host GitLab CI runners with you?
Yes — we host and manage your GitLab CI or GitHub Actions runners on VPS or dedicated infrastructure, without the shared-runner minute limits that come with hosted CI plans, and we keep the runner images patched and scanned.
How is managed Prometheus different from self-hosting it?
The engine is the same open-source Prometheus; the difference is who tunes the retention, scrape intervals and alerting rules over time. We run it as part of your plan, with changes covered by included DevOps hours instead of an extra platform-engineering hire.
What should a small UK team actually monitor first?
Start with SLOs tied to what your users feel — error rate and latency on the endpoints they hit most — rather than generic CPU and memory dashboards. We build the dashboard set around that during onboarding, then expand it as real incidents show what's missing.
How do I set up a private CI/CD server with Docker?
We run your CI/CD runners inside Docker on a VPS or dedicated server, isolated on the private network, with secrets held outside the repository. This is one of the standard set-ups we deliver, and it's covered by your included DevOps hours.
Do you write the on-call runbooks, or just the pipeline?
Both. A pipeline without a runbook just moves the incident from 'how do I deploy' to 'what do I do when the alert fires' — we write the runbook for the alerts we set up, and update it as your architecture changes.
Want a pipeline your team actually trusts at 2am?
Tell us your current CI/CD or monitoring gap, and we'll build the pipeline and dashboards using the DevOps hours already in your plan.