As a follow up to my tweet that started a discussion today (https://twitter.com/circa1977/status/520207883783663616), here's what I'm looking for:
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A skilled DevOps team that's available to book for on-call slots. DevOps in my mind are different than SysAdmins. They don't balk at getting into PHP (or other) code as necessary. They know how the platforms we're using work.
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High-availability: These folks are going to be getting alerts at 2:00am or on weekends. That's part of the job. A part of the job that I'm not up for. That's expensive, and making this affordable is a big part of the challenge.
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High-reliability: The first time this team has to escalate an issue back to me while I'm somewhere with my family or sleeping, it's no longer worry-free and I'm not getting what I paid for. They have to be able to handle this stuff.
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Non-competitive: I don't want to hire another dev shop that's also booking the same sorts of projects I do. They need to be focused on knowing the apps, understanding real world