DigitalAultis
— Basecamp

Your startup needs infrastructure.
Not a hire.

You just raised. You need to ship fast. You cannot afford a DevOps engineer yet, and you should not hire one until you know what you actually need. Basecamp builds your foundation in 7 weeks. You own everything. When you hire, you hire for the right seat.

Cost comparison: €60-100k DevOps hire with 9 months to value vs Basecamp at €1,990 with 7 weeks to working infrastructure
Start your basecamp → See the 7 weeks
— The Problem

Hiring too early is more expensive than waiting.

A DevOps engineer costs €60-100k/year. Finding the right one takes 3-6 months. Onboarding takes another 3. That is 6-9 months before you get value, and you are paying the salary the entire time.

Most startups hire too early because they feel infrastructure pain and assume a hire is the answer. Sometimes it is. Often, the answer is: build the right foundation first, learn what you actually need, then hire for the role that exists, not the role you imagined.

Basecamp is the foundation. 7 weeks. Working infrastructure. Your team trained on it. No guesswork about what to hire next.

Before Basecamp: chaotic manual deploys, stressed engineer at 3am. After Basecamp: clean GitOps pipeline, Grafana dashboard green, engineer sleeping
— What You Get

Not a pitch deck. Working infrastructure.

Six deliverables: CI/CD with ArgoCD, Observability with Prometheus and Grafana, Cloud Architecture with AWS, Security with shield, Runbooks with document, Everything as Code with Git branch

CI/CD Pipeline

GitOps with ArgoCD. Signed artifacts, progressive delivery, instant rollback. Your team ships multiple times a day without fear.

Observability

Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry. You see your system. Not logs you grep at 3am. Dashboards that tell you what is wrong before your users do.

Cloud Architecture

The right provider for your stage, not the one AWS sales recommended. Landing zones, networking, IAM. Built once, observed forever.

Security Baseline

Pod Security Standards, network policies, secrets in a real manager, supply-chain signing. Not SOC 2 theater. Real controls that block real threats.

Runbooks

Written for a stranger at 4am. Each one tested against a real incident scenario. Your on-call engineer follows a path, not a hunch.

Everything as Code

Every resource, every config, every policy in Git. Versioned, reviewed, reversible. No console clicks. No snowflake infrastructure.

— The 7 Weeks

Four phases. One mountain.

7-week Basecamp timeline: Week 1 Terrain Reading, Weeks 2-3 Base Camp, Weeks 4-6 First Ascent, Week 7 Handover
01

Terrain Reading

Week 1

We read your codebase, your architecture, your incident history. We sit through your standups. We talk to the engineer who is on call at 3am. We arrive without prescription and leave with a map.

Architecture auditCI/CD maturity assessmentCost analysisSecurity baseline checkOn-call review
02

Base Camp

Weeks 2-3

We build the foundation you will stand on for the next two years. Not the summit. The camp. Everything you need to ship safely, observe honestly, and sleep through the night.

CI/CD with GitOps (ArgoCD)Cloud architecture on the right providerObservability stack (Prometheus + Grafana + OTel)Security baseline (Pod Security, network policies, secrets)Runbooks your team can follow at 4am
03

First Ascent

Weeks 4-6

We ship the first real change through the new pipeline. Your team watches, participates, and learns. By the end, they have deployed through the system we built, not watched us deploy through it.

First production deployment via GitOpsProgressive delivery setup (canary or blue-green)Alerting tuned to signal, not noiseDashboard your CTO can read at a glance
04

Handover

Week 7

We hand you the keys. Documentation, runbooks, a 90-minute session with your team. You understand every decision because you were in the room when we made it. When you hire a DevOps engineer, you hire for the right role, not the one you guessed at.

Full documentationRunbook library90-minute team knowledge transferHiring profile: what to look for in your first DevOps hire30-day follow-up check included
— Questions

Asked at the trailhead.

Why not just hire a DevOps engineer?

A DevOps hire costs €60-100k/year plus 3-6 months to find and onboard. Basecamp costs a fraction of that and runs in 7 weeks. You get working infrastructure now, not in Q3. When you do hire, you hire for the right role because you know what your system actually needs.

What if we already have some infrastructure?

Most startups we work with have something. A CI pipeline someone set up. A Docker Compose file. A CloudFormation stack that nobody fully understands. We do not rip it out. We audit it, stabilize it, and build on top of what works.

Do we keep ownership of everything?

Yes. Every line of code, every config, every runbook is yours. In your Git repos, your cloud accounts, your namespaces. We bring expertise. You keep the assets.

What happens after the 7 weeks?

You can engage us on a monthly retainer (Ascent, €2,490/mo) for ongoing support, or take it in-house. The 30-day follow-up check is included regardless. Most teams hire their first DevOps engineer within 3 months of Basecamp and onboard them onto the system we built.

What if we are not on Kubernetes yet?

Good. Basecamp is the right time to decide. We will tell you honestly whether you need Kubernetes or whether a well-run VPS with Docker Compose is the right answer for your stage. We wrote an article about this. Read it.

How is this different from other DevOps consultancies?

We practice a semi-agentic approach. AI agents sit inside our pipelines and incident response, governed by MCP, with humans in the loop. Agents propose. Humans approve. You get the speed of automation with the judgment of experience. We are also from Leh, Ladakh. Patience is not a marketing word for us. It is how we work.

— Begin

Start at basecamp.

Reach the summit later. Build the foundation first.

Start your basecamp →