DevOps Tool Suite
Request for Information
DevOps Tool Suite
This is a Request for Information (RFI) only. Do not submit a proposal. This RFI is for planning purposes only and shall not be considered an Invitation for Bid, Request for Task Execution Plan, Request for Quotation or a Request for Proposal. Additionally, there is no obligation on the part of the Government to acquire any products or services described in this RFI. Your response to this RFI will be treated only as information for the Government to consider.
It is requested that all companies interested in participating in this effort please note their interest and address the questions outlined below.
You will not be entitled to payment for direct or indirect costs that you incur in responding to this RFI. Interested parties are responsible for adequately marking proprietary, restricted or competition sensitive information contained in their response.
VA Technology Acquisition Center (TAC) is seeking information concerning its proposed acquisition approach and the availability of capable Service Disabled Veteran-owned Small Businesses (SDVOSBs) to provide the requirements described below.
The VA s intention is to procure an enterprise DevOps Tools Managed Solution on a
Time-and-Materials (T&M) Basis. However, the approach of utilizing a T&M contract type is preliminary and Vendors are free to suggest alternative contract types to support this requirement. The Vendor will be responsible for providing VA a solution consisting of a suite of tools (as described in the Table below, or equal product(s) that meets the listed salient characteristics), including configuration, maintenance, commercially available software updates, original equipment manufacturer (or authorized reseller) provided professional services, training, on-ramping or replacement of DevOps tools, as well as potentially additional items that will be added as VA finalizes its requirements and acquisition strategy.
If interested, please provide the following:
Please provide a statement of all small business size status(s) your firm meets under North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) Code 541519. Vendors may suggest an alternative NAICS to be considered by the Government.
How long will it take from date of award through a product becoming available for use by VA? Once each software product is operational, what is the expected response time for support requests? Are there additional levels of support that can be purchased?
Is training available for the products, and is that something that would be included with the products, or would that be an additional cost?
What kind of on-boarding support is available for getting users access to the product(s)? (Customer Success Support Team, i.e. a product rep sitting on site once a week to support VA integration and adoption. )
For SaaS products, if VA wants access to the data at any time, how would VA obtain access in a standardized, machine readable format? Additionally, would any professional services be required for access to the data?
For SaaS products, what are the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and what happens if these SLAs are not met?
What is the standard policy for providing software updates, upgrades, and enhancements? What would be included in the license costs, and what would require separate professional services?
Please identify professional services labor categories, on a per DevOps tool basis, that would be required to implement DevOps tools across the VA enterprise and specify whether any of the professional service functions must be performed solely by the OEM (i.e. due to proprietary nature of software code) or can be performed by resellers.B Can any of the professional service labor categories/functions be consolidated?B For example, could the training function be consolidated into training Labor Categories (LCAT(s)) that requires X years of experience with the specific DevOps tool versus separate Training LCATs for each DevOps tool (i.e. Jira, Slack, etc.).B
Are there other costs for this suite that VA will incur that aren t accounted for here?
Can all the components/applications listed in the Table below be hosted external to the VA?
What other brands could meet the salient characteristics listed in the excel spreadsheet?
Are there additional salient characteristics VA should consider?
Would the commercial pricing models for the listed products support the Units of Measure provided in the Table below? If not, what Units of Measure should VA utilize?
Will you accept the User Agreements from these applications on the behalf of the VA?
Describe your approach to ensure that VA s DevOps tools are leveraging current and emerging commercially available technology.B If based on an emerging commercially available technology VA determined during the Period of Performance that it wants to add an additional application that was not in the original solicitation, or swap an existing application for a new one, would your firm be able to support that? What additional costs would be involved? Please note the preliminary contract type is T&M (although as noted above, Vendors are free to suggest alternative contract types).
Additionally, describe your methodology to manage several disparate DevOps tools during the transition.B
If interested in this effort, would it be as a prime or a subcontractor?
Do you have experience providing services, similar to what the Government is seeking, to other Government group(s)? If so, please provide contract numbers.
Describe your approach in presenting licensing usage in a unified manner for all utilized DevOps tools considering software will be utilized from a disparate group of OEMs?B Would the licensing usage be available in real time or near real time?B
Please provide commercial pricing for the products (or suggested alternative products) including all range pricing and any associated discounts. Additionally, please provide any additional loadings (Material and Handling, fee, etc.) that would be added to the commercial pricing?
Please provide any feedback or suggestions on the process and details discussed above.
Instructions for Submitting Questions and the RFI Response:
Submit any questions to this RFI directly to Kelly Reale at Kelly.Reale@va.gov and Joshua Cohen at Joshua.Cohen2@va.gov. RFI responses are to be submitted directly to Kelly Reale by 3:00PM Eastern Standard Time, March 26, 2019. If possible, please limit responses to 10 pages or less. Submissions shall be less than 5MB.
DevOps Tool
Version Type
Salient Characteristics
Unit of Measure used for Commercial Pricing
1
Slack: A chat client that provides a centralized way for teams to communicate. Integrates with DevOps tools such as PagerDuty, GitHub, Jira, etc. to enable fast conversations around events triggered by actions in other DevOps tools.
Enterprise Grid
1. FedRAMP authorized
2. Real time collaboration
3. Create unique channels around topics
4. Data encryption in transit and at rest
5. SAML-based SSO
6. Organization wide searching through messages
7. Shared channels between workspaces
Users
2
Jira: Project Management tool that allows software teams to plan, track and release software. Provides ability to create epics, user stories, and issues, plan sprints and distribute tasks across the software team.
Data Center
1. Ability to create epics and assign to tickets
2. Scrum and Kanban boards
3. Track, label, and filter work across a large number of teams
4. Prioritize tickets based on the importance
5. Agile reporting and customizable workflows
6. SAML-based SSO
7. Ability to automate rules and workflows, as desired
8. Shall be hosted external to VA (not VA Data Center or VAEC).
Users
3
CircleCI: Continuous delivery and integration platform that enables automated testing and automated deployment. Ability to integrate with other DevOps tools. Supports the automation of source code build, test, and deployment process.
Build on Linux
1. FedRAMP authorized
2. Define and orchestrate how job execution is run. (Build, Test, and Deploy).
3. Integration with GitHub
4. Integration with Slack for build and deployment notifications.
5. Ability to track and view all builds and dig into details such as build or queue time.
Containers / Parallelism
4
PagerDuty: Incident response platform that includes that ability for on-call management, automated escalations, automated response stakeholder communication, incident priority and postmortems. Integrates with other DevOps tools such as Datadog to trigger incidents and Slack to enable communication about incidents.
Enterprise
1. Ability for alerts to be created automatically when certain conditions are met.
2. Alerts able to be sent via email, text message, or push notification, as desired.
3. On call teams able to be set up via a calendar and both automatically and manually rotated.
4. Automatically route alerts based on customizable rules.
5. Integration with Slack and other DevOps tools.
6. Automate escalations if issues not resolved in specific timeframes.
Users
5
Datadog: SaaS application performance monitoring and log analysis tool. Provides performance monitoring for the entire technology stack, including application, hosts, and virtual machines.
Infrastructure Enterprise Package
1. Integrates with various DevOps tools.
2. Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance
3. Search, filter, and analyze your logs for troubleshooting and open-ended exploration
4. Visibility across teams
5. Notifies you of performance problems, whether they affect a single host or a massive cluster
6. Full API access to bring observation to all of your apps.
Host
6
BrowserStack: Ability to test software across devices and operating systems automatically. Ensure software will work for as many users as possible, early in the development process.
Enterprise
1. Interactive cross browser testing and debugging on desktop browsers and real mobile devices.
2. Run automated test on desktop browsers and real mobile devices.
3. Interactive testing of native and hybrid mobile apps on real iOS and Android devices.
4. Test web applications located behind firewall or on internal development environments by utilizing the secure and encrypted tunnel.
Parallel Tests
Kelly Reale
Contract Specialist
732-440-9712
kelly.reale@va.gov
