# Small DevOps Teams Source: https://www.jawsdeploy.net/solutions/small-devops-teams If your release process is two people, a hand-drawn diagram, and a shell script nobody admits to maintaining - Jaws Deploy is built for that team. Real environments, real release history, zero platform team required. ## The team we built this for You are probably the person reading this *because* you are the deployment person. There is no separate platform team. There is no internal developer platform group. There is just a small group of engineers who all secretly believe they are the one keeping production alive on Friday afternoons. That team does not need a 90-page architecture diagram. It needs **a deployment tool that pays for itself in the first sprint and gets out of the way**. > **// The honest truth about small-team CD - You don't have a deployment problem. You have a 'who owns the deployment script' problem.** > > Small teams almost always start with a CI pipeline that grew an `if branch == main: deploy` block, then a script, then five scripts, then a Confluence page that explains the scripts. The tool is rarely the bottleneck - the *ownership* is. Jaws Deploy gives the deployment a home that is not 'whoever pushed last week'. ## What the first week actually looks like This matters more than the feature checklist. Most platforms describe what's possible at month six. Here is what a real small team gets done in the first five working days. ## The first five days - **Day 1 - signup to first deployment**: Create a workspace, install one agent on a staging box, create a project, deploy a hello-world package. Realistically: 45 minutes. - **Day 2 - model your environments**: Add Dev, Staging, Production. Tag your existing servers. Move the connection string out of your script into a scoped variable. Cry a little. Continue. - **Day 3 - first real release**: Hook your existing CI to call the Jaws Deploy API after a successful build. Create a release. Deploy it to Staging. Watch the live log instead of refreshing a CI tab. - **Day 4-5 - promotion and rollback**: Promote that exact release to Production. Realize you can deploy the previous release with one click. Sleep better on Friday. ## What you stop owning The pitch is not "new features". It is "things that used to be your problem are now somebody else's problem." That is the small-team value proposition. ## The maintenance tax disappears - **The custom deployment script** - Jaws Deploy steps replace 80% of it. The remaining 20% lives in a versioned step template, not a `deploy.ps1` nobody reviews. - **The artifact server** - the built-in package feed is just there. No second service to monitor, patch, or apologize for. - **The 'which version is in staging?' question** - the deployment history answers it in two clicks. - **The rollback procedure** - re-deploy the previous release. There is no procedure. That *is* the procedure. - **The audit trail** - every deployment leaves a record. When somebody asks 'who deployed what when', you have an answer that does not start with 'let me grep CI logs'. > **// Pricing reality check - We did the math so you don't have to argue with finance.** > > Small teams get murdered by per-target pricing. Jaws Deploy's plans are flat at the small end: a free tier that is actually usable, then a single Professional plan that includes a useful machine count. You will not get to month two and discover the bill scales with the number of pods. ## What stays in your control The risk with any deployment platform is the lock-in conversation six months in. We have opinions about this, and they show up in the product. **The deployment definition** Steps, variables, secrets, environments - all editable, exportable, scriptable. Want to spin up a clone for testing? The REST API is right there. **The control plane** We host it, we update it, we keep it alive. If you ever need it on your own infrastructure, [Jaws Deploy Stack](https://www.jawsdeploy.net/platform/stack) is the same product, self-hosted. No migration. ## The shape that scales The single best thing about starting with Jaws Deploy as a three-person team is what happens at thirty people. The model does not break. The environments you defined on Day 2 still work. The release process you set up still works. New team members read the deployment history and learn how things ship, instead of asking the one person who remembers. That is the bet - that *the workflow you build now should not be the one you replace at scale*. > **// What this is not - It is not an internal developer platform. It is not a Kubernetes management plane.** > > Some products in this space try to be your entire infrastructure layer. Jaws Deploy is a deployment automation tool. It does deployments very well, talks nicely to everything else, and lets you build the rest of your stack the way you want. The narrowness is the point. ## A short and honest list of who should *not* buy this To respect your time: ## Be honest about fit before the trial - Your team has zero servers and ships everything as a single GitHub Actions workflow to a single PaaS. CI is enough. Save your money. - You need a full GitOps controller that reconciles cluster state from a repo. Different shape of problem. - Your deployment requirements include orchestrating thousands of microservices across multiple clouds with traffic-shifting. We are good. We are not *that* product. - You enjoy maintaining your bash deployment script. That is a real preference and we respect it. ## How to evaluate this in an hour Spin up a free workspace. Connect it to a project you already ship. Do **one** real deployment to a non-production environment. That is the entire evaluation. If it took longer than an hour, tell us where it broke - we genuinely want to know. The small-team experience is what we measure most carefully.