Ship code faster, break things less, and sleep better at night. 5labs helps development teams across Edinburgh and the UK adopt DevOps practices that eliminate manual bottlenecks, automate infrastructure, and create deployment pipelines you can trust. From containerisation with Docker and Kubernetes to monitoring with Grafana and Prometheus, we build the engineering culture and tooling that modern software demands.
Too many development teams still deploy code manually, manage servers by hand, and find out about outages from their customers. DevOps changes that. At 5labs, we implement the practices, tools, and automation that let your team deliver software reliably and frequently. Based in Edinburgh, we work with startups shipping their first product and established businesses modernising legacy deployment workflows.
Our DevOps engineers set up continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines that test, build, and deploy your code automatically whenever changes are merged. We containerise applications with Docker, orchestrate them with Kubernetes, and manage infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible. Monitoring and observability are built in from the start, so your team knows exactly what is happening in production at all times.
Our DevOps work pairs naturally with our cloud solutions for organisations moving to AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Teams building new products benefit from combining DevOps with our custom software development or SaaS development services for an end-to-end delivery capability.
Automation and reliability engineering for modern software teams
We design and build automated pipelines using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI. Every code push triggers automated tests, builds, and deployments, removing manual steps and human error from the release process.
We package your applications into Docker containers that run consistently across development, staging, and production environments. No more "it works on my machine" problems. Containers make your software portable and predictable.
For applications that need to scale, we deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters that handle load balancing, auto-scaling, rolling updates, and self-healing. Your containers run where they are needed, when they are needed.
We define your entire infrastructure in Terraform and Ansible configurations. Environments become version-controlled, reproducible, and disposable. Spinning up a new staging environment takes minutes, not days.
We implement full-stack monitoring with Grafana, Prometheus, and ELK Stack. Dashboards show real-time system health, while automated alerts notify your team before small issues become outages.
Security is not an afterthought. We integrate vulnerability scanning, dependency checking, secret management, and compliance validation directly into your CI/CD pipeline so that every deployment is automatically checked for security issues.
A practical approach to transforming your development workflow
We review your current development workflow, infrastructure, deployment process, and monitoring. This audit identifies bottlenecks, manual steps, reliability risks, and quick wins that deliver immediate value.
We design a CI/CD architecture tailored to your tech stack, team size, and deployment targets. Branch strategies, testing stages, approval gates, and rollback procedures are all defined and documented.
We codify your infrastructure using Terraform, set up container registries, configure Kubernetes clusters, and establish environment parity between development, staging, and production.
We build your CI/CD pipelines, integrate automated testing, configure deployment targets, and set up artefact management. Your team can start shipping code through the pipeline immediately.
We deploy monitoring infrastructure, create dashboards for key metrics, and configure alerting rules. Your team gets visibility into application performance, infrastructure health, and deployment status in real time.
We train your team on the new tools and workflows, document everything, and provide ongoing support during the transition. Our goal is to leave your team fully self-sufficient and confident in the new setup.
Battle-tested tools chosen for reliability and community support
Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, ArgoCD. We select the right CI/CD platform based on your existing toolchain and deployment requirements, ensuring smooth integration with your version control workflow.
Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Amazon ECS, Google GKE. We containerise applications and manage orchestration at scale, whether you are running a handful of services or hundreds of microservices.
Terraform, Ansible, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK Stack, Datadog. We manage infrastructure as code and build comprehensive monitoring that gives your team complete visibility into system health and performance.
Pair DevOps with these services for maximum impact
Common questions about our DevOps services
DevOps is a set of practices that brings together software development and IT operations. The goal is to shorten the development lifecycle, increase deployment frequency, and improve the reliability of releases. It involves automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, and monitoring. DevOps is as much about culture and collaboration as it is about tools.
Costs depend on the scope of work. Setting up a basic CI/CD pipeline for a single application might start from £2,000. A comprehensive DevOps transformation covering containerisation, Kubernetes, monitoring, and infrastructure as code for a larger team typically ranges from £10,000 to £30,000. We also offer ongoing managed DevOps support on a monthly retainer basis.
Not necessarily. Kubernetes is powerful but adds complexity. For smaller applications or teams, simpler solutions like Docker Compose, AWS ECS, or even serverless functions may be more appropriate. We assess your workload, team size, and scaling requirements before recommending an orchestration strategy. We will always choose the simplest tool that meets your needs.
It depends on your existing workflow. GitHub Actions is excellent if your code lives on GitHub. GitLab CI integrates tightly with GitLab repositories. Jenkins remains a solid choice for complex, highly customised pipelines. We help you choose the tool that fits your team and workflow, and we can migrate between tools if needed.
A basic CI/CD pipeline for a single application can be set up in 1 to 2 weeks. A full DevOps transformation for a larger team, including containerisation, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and training, typically takes 4 to 12 weeks depending on the number of services and the complexity of the existing infrastructure.
Yes. We regularly audit and improve existing DevOps configurations. Common issues we address include slow pipelines, flaky tests, missing monitoring, insecure secrets management, and infrastructure that has drifted from its code definitions. We identify the highest-impact improvements and implement them systematically.
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations. It focuses on measuring and improving system reliability through error budgets, service level objectives, incident response procedures, and automation. We help teams adopt SRE practices that reduce downtime and improve response to incidents.
Yes. Knowledge transfer is a key part of every DevOps engagement. We provide hands-on training sessions, detailed documentation, and recorded walkthroughs. Our goal is to leave your team fully capable of managing and extending the infrastructure and pipelines we build, without depending on us for day-to-day operations.
Free Assessment | Expert Implementation | Edinburgh-Based Team
⭐ Trusted by Businesses Across Edinburgh & the UK
