There’s a problem. Your website isn’t allowing customers to complete their purchases. Something is failing, you don’t know what, and neither you nor your team can solve it. You need someone external—an expert used to bridging Development and Operations—a DevOps engineer.
Now then, when will they arrive? How reliable will they be? These and other questions may overwhelm you and prevent you from thinking clearly, but don’t panic. Act.
Luckily, you’re not alone in this. At Crazy Imagine Software, we’ve seen hundreds of cases like this, and we know exactly how to put out the fire. Sit down, breathe, and let’s look at the problem together.
First Phase: Crisis Assessment and Containment
Your first step in an emergency like this is not to solve it, but to contain it. Although you may be tempted to fix it internally, the best approach is to document everything the reinforcement will need to accelerate their work.
A failed CI/CD that impacts your customers’ experience is critical. For now, the goal is to isolate the issue, understand its magnitude, and stabilize the situation before integrating additional talent.
Error Identification
This is the moment to determine the cause of the crisis and start outlining the action plan. Whether the issue comes from integration, deployment, or another reason, this will help you execute the next step and assess the severity of the situation.
If the failure is recent and directly related to the latest deployment, the quickest path is to revert to the last known stable state. It’s not a real fix; it doesn’t address the root cause, but it stops revenue loss and buys you time for the rescue strategy.
Alert Communication
After identifying the error, isolating it, and rolling back, it’s necessary to contact the executives to inform them of the situation, the containment plan, and the rescue strategy.
Transparency and expectation management are crucial. Effective communication reduces executive anxiety and pressure on your team. Don’t promise a resolution timeline before the expert arrives—give them the necessary time to work without stress.
Second Phase: Rescue Activation with External Talent
The goal of this phase is to find the specialized reinforcement and define their framework of action. Remember, the solution is not to attempt a blind repair, but to integrate external support with the experience required for crises like this.
Traditional recruitment won't help you here. It’s tedious, costly, and slow. You can’t solve in a month what you need to address now. You need a faster and more effective strategy to put out the fire—and that is Staff Augmentation.
This is a solution we use at Crazy Imagine Software to mitigate the risks of traditional hiring and accelerate onboarding. Instead of months or weeks, we’re talking days and hours.
Incoming Profile Description
The key to success lies in the precision of the profile. This is why documenting everything matters. When you approach the root of the issue, you begin thinking about the profiles that could fix it, and the better you know what you need, the easier it is to find it.
Now we are dealing with a critical CI/CD failure affecting the payment functionality. What’s required is a senior DevOps engineer with proven troubleshooting experience. Based on our expertise, the ideal profile includes:
- Platform specialization: Mastery of your cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and orchestrator (Kubernetes, ECS).
- Mastery of the CI/CD stack: Proven expertise in the specific tools that failed.
- Root cause analysis: An expert who doesn’t just apply patches but fixes the architecture to avoid recurrence.
Definition of Boundaries and Deadlines
It is very important that the reinforcement works within clear boundaries that guide them toward the central issue and help you measure their impact effectively.
On one hand, you must establish a primary objective for the incoming talent. The priority is to structure the first 48 hours. Within this framework, a possible sequence of actions is:
- Stabilization of the pipeline and payment functionality.
- Preliminary identification of the root cause.
- Proposal of a short- and medium-term solution plan.
Remember: the success criteria in Staff Augmentation are measurable results.
Third Phase: Integration, Stabilization, and Knowledge Transfer
We’re getting closer and closer to resolving the failure and returning to normalcy.
The final stage is critical—not only for incorporating the external resource and stabilizing the platform, but also for documenting the solution and ensuring knowledge transfer for the future.
Credential Transfer
While cybersecurity is essential, urgency requires agility. It’s important to balance both factors to speed up the expert’s actions and optimize deployment.
Provide temporary access, initially read-only, and later limited write access. Ensure that credentials are granted under the direct supervision of a member of your team until stabilization is achieved.
On the other hand, share pipeline documentation, architecture diagrams (if available), and information from the latest security review. The expert’s time should be spent fixing—not searching.
Rapid Stabilization
It’s time to act.
The first milestone is the return to functionality. Unless otherwise indicated, the DevOps expert will focus on the Minimum Viable Solution (MVS): the smallest, safest change needed to get the pipeline operational again. Depending on the case, this may involve:
- A configuration adjustment.
- A correction in a deployment script.
- A critical permission change.
Once the expert applies the fix, your team must validate the change together before closing the alert.
Root Cause Identification
The issue has been resolved and deployment completed successfully, but the work isn’t over. Now that the situation is calm, the DevOps expert will proceed to identify the root cause.
The main deliverable is a clear report based on a Root Cause Analysis. This report should answer three key questions:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- How can we ensure it doesn’t happen again?
This information is vital for your technical roadmap. Why? Simple: you turn a crisis into justification to invest in infrastructure.
Legacy and Exit
With the crisis resolved and the issue identified, the expert has one final task: transferring the findings and insights to your internal team.
The most important deliverable is a document where the DevOps expert reports the failure, the applied solution, and the preventive practices that will avoid future crises.
There is also a session where the expert shares with your team the technical details of the fix and corresponding preventive strategies. This step maximizes your investment, elevates your team’s technical capacity, and prepares it for the future.
