Particle41
Driving Adoption of DevOps Culture

The 41st element in the periodic table is niobium, a superconductor metal that strengthens other alloys. In a similar vein, Particle41 is the niobium of the software industry, as it is actively developing a DevOps-as-a-Service offering that provides fractionalized DevOps and cloud talent. This is particularly beneficial for smaller companies without dedicated in-house DevOps or cloud engineers. In addition, the program is designed to offer flexibility in staffing for DevOps and cloud needs.

“DevOps is gaining traction among companies, but they require the talent to implement it. We bootstrap them into being more DevOps and cloud-native,” says Chris Fromm, Senior Leader of DevOps-as-a-Service, Particle41.

Serving as an app modernization consultant, Particle41 assists clients requiring diverse software implementations and upgrades. This partnership enables organizations to seek the firm’s fractionalized DevOps and cloud talent within 40, 80, 120, and 160 monthly working hours. The bench strength, expertise, and stability of a team of engineers available during these operating periods empower clients to scale the staffing solution according to their requirements.

Particle41’s fractionalized DevOps and cloud talent program is available through a subscription model. Once organizations request its services, the firm conducts an initial discovery audit to review their existing infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines and determine their need to upgrade DevOps processes. The detailed inventory enables Particle41 to develop a runbook to support clients in developing, managing, and integrating new infrastructure-as-code and pipelines into their existing ecosystem.

Particle41 executes these software upgrades using best practices and standardized templates like Terraform modules, Chef recipes, Ansible playbooks, and GitHub actions.

These templates—which are maintained in a repository called the foundry—are constantly improved and amended to ensure that the firm meets the changing industry standards. This approach enables organizations to receive solutions built on a proven foundation, avoiding the pitfalls of one-off code with potential vulnerabilities and security flaws.

Clients are privy to prompt incident response to mitigate risks that affect their software and infrastructure development journey. In addition, the firm implements other maintenance services such as tagging standards, governance controllers like cloud custodians, and monitoring features on the clients’ cloud platforms, empowering them to be responsible cloud citizens. While new elements are continuously added to improve DevOps culture and processes, Particle41’s team of industry veterans also guides its clientele in cost-optimizing their IT operations.

One of Particle 41’s notable success stories is when it helped its clients achieve complete app modernization through prem-to-cloud migration and DevOps transformation. Lucid Hearing, a leading global hearing aids manufacturer, wanted to develop a new cloud-based back-end and architecture to support their customer data platform. Particle41 immediately deployed a team of engineers to build a microservices architecture on Azure, ensuring that its environment was reliable and secure. The firm also developed automated extract, transfer, and load (ETL) pipelines to ensure that data is seamlessly migrated into a central repository.

DevOps is gaining traction among companies, but they require the talent to implement it. We bootstrap them into being more DevOps and cloud-native

Particle41’s experts also developed container-based application solutions to provide GraphQL support for mobile applications. DevOps pipelines and Azure-based monitors were integrated to ensure foolproof continuous deployment and app stability, respectively. Through the firm’s DevOps-as-a-Service, Lucid Hearing successfully obtained a customer-centric data platform and software infrastructure.

This instance illustrates how clients can benefit from the firm’s DevOps-as-a-Service. In addition, Fromm envisions imbibing DevOps as a culture into every aspect of software and deployment for its clients. Particle41’s new outlook aims to strengthen its clientele’s IT operations and help them achieve their business objectives, similar to the functionality of niobium.