IT Infrastructure Support: Building Reliable IT Operations

Shift Ahead Technologies offers IT infrastructure support through reliable, automated, and scalable solutions. This visual highlights their approach to eliminating toil, standardizing processes with Infrastructure as Code, and documenting knowledge. Success metrics demonstrate significant improvements in recovery time, team structure, and knowledge transfer, with annual attrition rates below 2%. Sustainable value is emphasized by retaining skilled engineers.

You may have had the typical sales "pitch" by an offshore company to reduce your OpEx by as much as 30% to 60% by outsourcing support of your servers overseas.

The challenge though starts off the next year. Despite the apparent success of the plan, it was based on a false assumption that all the same staff would be available to your account. Sadly, the traditional vendors have a habit of flogging their workers, and in the whole IT industry, only 86% to 88% of workers remain year over year. As you lose a principal engineer, so do your most critical skills.

We at Shift Ahead have a different point of view on infrastructure. It's a common misunderstanding that a ticket is a problem solved; we consider that the real essence of support is laying out a solid and reliable framework where the issues don't even have a chance to appear.

The Reality of Scaling Infrastructure

Dedicated team of experts can do just that; below you will find an example of how it was done in case where a dedicated team at Shift Ahead helped a fast-financial-platform-growth customer with scaling up their infrastructure.

The company’s client was managing millions of daily transactions, however, their own SRE team was under extreme pressure. They were having over a thousand daily monitoring alerts and had been used to the vendor offshore who treated the situation as a game of Musical chairs, changing the team all the time, so that even when a person came back, they still could not fully get to grip with hybrid Kubernetes and AWS environment.

In reality, scaling infrastructure is anything but simple.

Dedicated team of experts can do just that; below you will find an example of how it was done in case where a dedicated team at Shift Ahead helped a fast-financial-platform-growth customer with scaling up their infrastructure.

But the company's SRE team was at breaking point when handling millions of transactions a day. They had been receiving more than 1000 alerts per day and were familiar with the vendor offshore who treated it as a game of musical chairs, changing the team throughout. So even if someone returned, they were not able to fully get their hands dirty with hybrid Kubernetes and AWS environment.

Given the rate at which IT staff turnover, even if someone were to leave, it would be as if they were starting from scratch, losing a lot of time.

Shift Ahead therefore, decided to take a different approach and select the most qualified engineers as a main delivery component of the solution and use an Infrastructure Reliability Pod.

As of yet, there's no system of engineer's pools that are being shared – just one client team which had a set of engineers assigned permanently, so these are the only ones who were really getting deep down into the details and staying in one place.

Step-by-Step:​‍​‌‍​‍‌ Laying the Foundation

At first, our engineers were addressing each problem as it arose. But somewhere along the way we decided to design truly durable bricks to help back up the client's fast growth and, ultimately, become their backbone.

Step 1: Getting Rid of Toil

First, we did their telemetry auditing. We found that nearly half of their lower-level incidents were avoidable circumstances, like unrotating certificates and performing manual checks on the databases. Hence, we focussed on the recurring issues. In this way, we could get rid of that feeling of always having to do the same thing.

Step 2: Going from Manual to Code

Manual changes result in variations between the configuration. So, we all combined all their scripts together, version-controlled infrastructure as code (IaC) with Terraform.

We used default settings that could not be changed in their cloud, for instance.

· We added automated state verification to mitigate risk of outages due to manual actions.

The final step involves making the Knowledge Code.

Step 3 involves creating the Knowledge Code.

Whenever we made any architectural change or a runbook, we made sure to record all the details. Our job is to extract the knowledge that is embedded in people and put it in a system that can be used by all.

The Bottom Line

Apart from the excellent performance, we have a very low turnover, where it is kept below 2 percent which helps us in our performance. This means that the systems were designed by engineers who are still around to operate the automatic systems.

Our Success Metrics:

Metric	Before Shift Ahead	After 12 Months
High-Severity Recovery Time	3.5+ Hours	< 40 Minutes
Team Structure	Shared Pool	Dedicated Pod
Knowledge Transfer	Ad-hoc	Documented & Codified

It’s evident there are offshore cost advantages; however, these savings truly can’t come into play unless you are able to retain the staff through year two.

Facing a similar IT challenge? Shift Ahead can help.

From identifying the root cause to implementing the right solution, our team helps businesses improve IT performance, reliability, and operational efficiency.

Have an IT challenge? Let’s fix it with Shift Ahead.