VSHN AppFlow

AppFlow is a category of services designed to review your current position in your application development workflow and deployment journey. We assess, advise, and plan concrete next steps with you. If you enjoy working with us, we proceed to engineer the entire application development flow and deployment processes alongside your developers or application owners. This establishes a foundation for taking over operational responsibility with AppOps, enabling your developers to concentrate on their primary tasks while we handle the most critical aspects of day-2 operations and stand by to support you.

VSHN AppFlow and AppOps can also be considered as the connective elements to leverage other VSHN products and services like APPUiO, Managed OpenShift, VSHN Application Catalog, or Managed Services in VMs.

Ultimately, we assist you in being fast to write code and bring it into production, where it generates real value for your business.

Offering Overview

AppFlow services are one-time engagements that may lead to us assuming Application Operations responsibility on a continuous basis.

We firmly believe that we can only successfully operate and take responsibility for what we have co-created - the best possible application deployment and hosting. This begins by examining a specific application or business use case for which you seek to improve the development and deployment workflow or outsource a portion of the Application Operations.

Initial Pre-Sales Requirements Engineering: As part of our sales process, a Solution Architect will work with you and your developers or application owners to understand how we might assist, leading to an initial offer, usually for an Application Deployment Review. This is usually free as part of pre-sales.
Application Deployment Review: Our Application Deployment Review is a mixture of collaborative workshops, assessments by our Solution Architects, solution design, and conception. It provides a comprehensive review and actionable plan to optimize your app’s deployment, including architecture advice, cost estimation, and process improvements. By understanding your application and development practices, we offer insights to enhance cloud-native readiness and scalability, laying the groundwork for potential future collaboration on implementation.
Application Deployment Engineering: Following our Application Deployment Review we know what we should engineer to deploy your application. Based on your exact needs, we engineer CI/CD pipelines, implement container image version and dependency maintenance, write Kubernetes manifests, implement base monitoring and persistent data backup and write documentation. We document the deployment workflow, data recovery procedures and developers instructions.

Enabling Conditions

The small print that we emphasize, because this is our way to ensure successful collaboration.

While we live DevOps, meaning that Developers and Operations Engineers have to work closely together, boundaries are important to create clarity and free people up to deliver value to your business. The following is important and without an agreement to this, we can’t provide the best possible collaboration.

We need

Your clarifications to understand your business case or your business process behind the application.
Be able to collaborate with your developers, software architects, or application specialists. When 3rd party applications or code are involved, we at least need good documentation, code access, and access to technical support of the developers in one way or the other. Details are to be clarified before we start working - we’ll help you do that.
Access to your code, not data. We’re used to splitting environments to separate dummy, test, and production data. We’ll not change your application, but we might need to dive into some aspects of your code to better understand things.

We are

Delivering Results vs Body-Leasing: VSHNeers (our employees) work for VSHN, while it’s industry standard to bill-by-the-hour, you can’t buy our engineers' time and let them work for you. We agree on the scope of workshops, epics and tasks, and deliver on that, providing concepts and solutions to concrete questions and customer need, in iterations (we use Scrum) - but we don’t body-lease.
We might be wrong - We can underestimate the effort, we might need additional collaboration or time on our side that goes beyond what was offered initially - we live agile, we’ll work with you to figure out how to continue and control the cost.