DevOps Best Practices for Small Teams
Most DevOps writing is aimed at hundred-engineer organisations. This guide is for the rest of us — the five-person product team that needs to ship reliably without hiring a platform group.
1. Pick boring infrastructure
A single cloud provider, a managed Postgres, and a container platform (Fly.io, Render, Railway, or a small managed Kubernetes cluster) will take you a very long way. Resist the urge to assemble seven services.
2. Everything in Git
Application code, infrastructure (Terraform or Pulumi), CI workflows, and runbooks — all in version control. If it is not in Git, it does not exist.
3. One pipeline, three stages
Keep CI/CD simple: test → build → deploy. Use GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. Deploy on every merge to main. Make rollbacks one command.
4. Observability from day one
Add structured logging, basic metrics (RED — Rate, Errors, Duration) and one good alert: "is the homepage returning 200?". Grafana Cloud and BetterStack both have generous free tiers.
5. A humane on-call
With five engineers, on-call should be one alert per week, not one per night. Tune your alerts ruthlessly — every page that is not actionable should be deleted or fixed.
6. Write things down
A short runbook for the top five incidents will save you more time than any tool.
Rustyt advises small teams on exactly this kind of pragmatic DevOps practice. Reach out if you would like a second pair of eyes.