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"DevOps" is a broad label. Here's how to break it into concrete capabilities — CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, security — and the questions that actually reveal whether a partner is ready to handle them.
"DevOps" gets used as a catch-all term, which makes it hard to evaluate a potential partner — vague language invites vague proposals. The more useful approach is to break "DevOps" into the concrete work it actually covers, and judge a provider on how specifically they can speak to each part.
A provider that can only speak in generalities about "streamlining your infrastructure" hasn't given you anything to evaluate. Specific questions produce specific, checkable answers.
It's easy for a provider to list impressive-sounding tools — Kubernetes, Terraform, whatever is currently fashionable — without those tools being used well. A team that can explain why they chose a particular approach for your specific constraints, and what trade-off it involves, is showing more real maturity than a longer tool list. Ask them to walk through a past decision and the reasoning behind it, not just the outcome.
Be cautious of a partner who wants to rebuild your entire infrastructure from scratch before understanding why it's built the way it is today. Sometimes a rebuild is genuinely warranted — but that should be a conclusion reached after discovery, not a starting assumption.
DevOps and security are inseparable in practice — how credentials are stored, who can deploy to production, and how dependencies are kept patched are all DevOps decisions with direct security consequences. A partner who treats security as someone else's problem is describing an incomplete DevOps practice.
Regardless of who runs your infrastructure day to day, you should end up with documentation and access that don't depend on any one person staying reachable. Ask upfront how infrastructure knowledge is documented and who else on the team can operate it if your main point of contact is unavailable.
6STANZA breaks DevOps engagements into the concrete capabilities above — CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerization, observability, and security — rather than treating it as one undifferentiated service, so the scope of what's being built and maintained is always explicit.