Top 10 DevOps Engineer Skills Every Aspiring Engineer Needs in 2025

DevOps is everywhere! More than a technology solution, DevOps emerged as the common buzzword for the IT industry, especially the US IT market. Its ability to drive consistent, secure, and faster software delivery reduces time to market and improves end-user satisfaction.

Given these benefits, DevOps has become a necessity for many leading enterprises. Even small and medium companies are also pursuing DevOps. All they need is DevOps engineers and expertise in DevOps!

Do you know? DevOps is one of the top-most-wanted technology roles that the US IT industry is looking for! The need for must have skills for DevOps engineer roles is increasing. DevOps is like a bridge that connects software development and operations teams. It breaks down barriers between these departments and speeds up the software development and implementation process.

This is a significant advantage for businesses at all levels, making DevOps professionals and service providers highly sought after. In fact, among companies that heavily rely on digital technology, a “DevOps engineer” is the most in-demand IT job.

What is a DevOps engineer? What does a DevOps engineer do? That is the question that an aspiring DevOps engineer has. DevOps is not a technology, but rather a production methodology. Drawing cues from the agile, DevOps developers bring together swift development speeds and automation capabilities.

DevOps services companies play a crucial role in helping businesses scale their DevOps efforts. They ensure the continuous integration, delivery, and deployment of software, which improves organizational efficiency and competitiveness. To thrive in this ever-changing domain and secure a role as a DevOps engineer, one must possess a wide-ranging skill set.

While robust products were guaranteed with agile, DevOps emphasizes automation, reducing errors, and improving speed. The other significant concept of DevOps is that developers and operations staff members work in tandem instead of in siloes. This is the other principle that drives the growth and success of DevOps.

Finally, to become a DevOps engineer, one needs to have the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively. While courses on coding and testing are vital for skills in DevOps engineer roles, communication skills are essential for a successful DevOps developer.

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Understanding the Role of DevOps in DevOps Engineering?

DevOps is a software development approach that serves as a bridge between developers and IT teams. It enables organizations to release small features and swiftly integrate feedback rapidly. Here are some additional advantages:

• Reduced software failures.
• The shortened time between identifying and fixing issues.

DevOps transcends the limitations of the traditional waterfall model. It involves various development, testing, and deployment technologies to establish automated CI/CD pipelines. Below are some of the best DevOps tools:

• Git and GitHub: Source code management (Version Control System).
• Jenkins: An automation server equipped with plugins for constructing CI/CD pipelines.
• Selenium: Automation testing.
• Docker: A platform for software containerization.
• Kubernetes: A tool for container orchestration.
• Puppet: Used for configuration management and deployment.
• Chef: Also employed for configuration management and deployment.
• Ansible: Another tool for configuration management and deployment.
• Nagios: Utilized for continuous monitoring.

Useful link: What is DevOps Services?

Who is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is an expert dedicated to the principles of DevOps, which emphasize merging development and operations tasks to enhance the software development process without compromising quality.

DevOps engineers typically have a deep understanding of development and operations procedures, enabling them to work seamlessly in both realms. Moreover, they are usually proficient in automation tools and methodologies, further expediting the software development workflow.

What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?

DevOps engineers simplify this complexity by bridging the gap between the actions needed to change an application swiftly and the tasks required to maintain its stability. Development and IT operations teams often possess distinct skills and objectives. Developers prioritize adding new features to an application, while operations teams focus on maintaining its reliability after release.

DevOps revolves around streamlining and automating processes, and DevOps engineers play a crucial role in integrating code, maintaining applications, and management. These responsibilities require understanding development life cycles and grasping the DevOps culture, which encompasses its philosophy, methodologies, and tools.

In an agile setting, developers, system administrators, and programmers may operate in silos, each contributing to the same product but failing to share essential information that ensures user value.

Some organizations may hire professionals to implement DevOps within their workflows. Still, since successful DevOps adoption hinges on cultural and procedural changes, DevOps consulting services are crucial to avoid exacerbating the disconnect between developers and operational teams.

Useful link: What Are Azure Devops Services?

How to Become a DevOps Engineer – Steps to Launch Your DevOps Career

Becoming a successful DevOps engineer requires combining technical expertise, practical experience, and a strategic approach to professional growth. Below, we outline the steps you can take to kickstart and excel in your DevOps career, highlighting the significance of grasping the role of a DevOps engineer and obtaining relevant certifications.

1) Understand the Role of a DevOps Engineer

To start your journey, it’s crucial to understand the role of a DevOps engineer. This involves bridging the gap between development and operations teams, automating workflows, and ensuring seamless deployment processes. DevOps engineers are also responsible for monitoring performance and optimizing system efficiency, making their role pivotal in modern IT environments.

2) Build a Strong Foundation in Technical Skills

Mastering essential technical skills is a key step in learning how to become a DevOps engineer. Focus on:

• Programming and Scripting: Proficiency in Python, Ruby, and Bash.
• Version Control: Tools like Git and GitHub.
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Tools like Jenkins or CircleCI.

3) Gain Hands-On Experience

Practical experience is indispensable for anyone pursuing a DevOps career. Work on real-world projects or contribute to open-source initiatives to gain experience solving real-world challenges.

4) Obtain a DevOps Engineer Certification

Certifications demonstrate your expertise and enhance your credibility in the competitive job market. Earning a DevOps engineer certification, such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Docker Certified Associate, or Kubernetes Administrator, can help you stand out from the competition and showcase your expertise to potential employers.

5) Continuously Learn and Adapt

The field of DevOps is ever-evolving. Keeping pace with evolving industry trends, tools, and best practices is crucial to long-term success in a DevOps career. Consider joining DevOps communities, attending webinars, and following influential thought leaders to keep your knowledge up to date.

Useful link: Why Should You Adopt DevOps and What are the Benefits it Offers?

Top 10 DevOps Skills Required for a DevOps Engineer

Mastering these essential skills is crucial for a DevOps engineer to excel in their career. Below is a detailed explanation of the top 10 skills, along with the key tools that complement them.

1) AI and Machine Learning in DevOps (AIOps)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) transforms DevOps with predictive analytics and more intelligent automation. AIOps helps identify bottlenecks, resolve incidents faster, and improve system reliability. It leverages AI to automate anomaly detection, predict failures, and optimize performance in DevOps workflows.

Key Skills:

• Predictive analytics
• Anomaly detection

Tools:

• Splunk
• Moogsoft
• Dynatrace

2) GitOps

GitOps is a declarative methodology for managing infrastructure and applications, utilizing Git as the single source of truth. This ensures consistency and enables rapid, secure deployments. GitOps uses Git as a central repository for declarative infrastructure and application management, enabling consistent and rapid deployments.

Key Skills:

• Version control
• CI/CD pipelines

Tools:

• Git
• Flux
• ArgoCD

3) Platform Engineering

Platform engineering focuses on creating reusable and scalable platforms for development teams. This role aligns with the DevOps engineer skills of optimizing workflows and infrastructure. Platform engineering creates scalable, reusable platforms to improve developer efficiency and streamline workflows.

Key Skills:

• Platform design
• Service orchestration

Tools:

• Backstage
• Crossplane
• Kubernetes

4) Cloud Computing and Cloud Platforms

Cloud skills are vital for leveraging scalable infrastructure. Cloud platforms offer efficient environments for deploying, testing, and managing applications. Cloud computing enables DevOps engineers to automate workflows and optimize resource allocation, resulting in seamless operations.

Key Skills:

• Cloud architecture
• Resource monitoring

Tools:

• AWS
• Azure
• Google Cloud

5) Containerization and Orchestration

Mastering container technologies like Docker and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes is critical for deploying and managing scalable applications. Containerization packages applications, while orchestration automates deployment and scaling for seamless operations.

Key Skills:

• Container lifecycle management
• Orchestration strategies

Tools:

• Docker
• Kubernetes

Useful link: DevOps on AWS: An Introduction on How to Integrate Seamlessly

6) CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment)

CI/CD automates the software delivery pipeline, ensuring seamless integration and deployment of code. This is a core competency for a DevOps engineer, ensuring fast, reliable, and repeatable software delivery pipelines.

Key Skills:

• Pipeline creation
• Automated testing

Tools:

• Jenkins
• GitLab CI/CD
• CircleCI

7) Security in DevOps (DevSecOps)

Integrating security into DevOps, also known as DevSecOps, ensures that vulnerabilities are addressed early in the development process. DevSecOps embeds security practices across all stages of the software development lifecycle, proactively preventing vulnerabilities.

Key Skills:

• Vulnerability assessment
• Secure coding practices

Tools:

• Snyk
• Checkmarx
• OWASP ZAP

8) Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC enables automating infrastructure provisioning, making deployments faster and error-free. IaC automates infrastructure setup and management, replacing manual configurations with code-driven processes.

Key Skills:

• Scripting and automation
• Cloud-native deployments

Tools:

• Terraform
• Ansible
• Pulumi

9) Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR)

A strong DR strategy ensures minimal downtime and data loss during failures, a crucial aspect of maintaining robust systems. Backup and disaster recovery strategies minimize downtime and data loss, ensuring system resilience in the event of failures.

Key Skills:

• Backup automation
• Recovery planning

Tools:

• Veeam
• AWS Backup
• Cohesity

10) Database Management and Automation

Efficient database management and automation improve applications’ performance, reliability, and scalability. Database management automates backups, scaling, and optimization to ensure high-performance and reliable systems.

Key Skills:

• Database tuning
• Automated backups

Tools:

• MongoDB
• PostgreSQL
• Flyway

Useful link: DevOps outsourcing: Things to Know About Before Getting Started

Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

A DevOps engineer’s role encompasses proficiently managing the IT infrastructure that underpins software code in various environments, including dedicated setups, multi-tenant setups, or hybrid cloud configurations. Their responsibilities may include provisioning resources, selecting suitable deployment models, overseeing testing procedures to validate each software release, and monitoring performance after release. This includes preparing test data, analyzing results, troubleshooting issues, and communicating feedback to software developers.

As a methodology, DevOps promotes frequent, incremental code changes, necessitating regular deployment and testing cycles. Although DevOps engineers generally do not create code from scratch, they need to have a fundamental grasp of software development languages and be well-versed in the tools used to create or modify code.

They collaborate with development teams to address the coding and scripting needed to connect various application components, such as APIs, libraries, and software development kits (SDKs). Additionally, they integrate other elements, such as SQL data management and messaging tools, required for running software releases on various operating systems and production infrastructures.

A DevOps engineer’s core focus lies in automating and maintaining live environments. Consequently, job roles often emphasize tasks related to automating and maintaining software products, systems, and services.

This includes activities such as automating significant data pipelines, providing on-call support for system availability, developing or procuring application and system management tools to reduce manual effort, implementing automated management features like performance monitoring, diagnostics, and failover, and ensuring high availability while evaluating risks for all changes within the environment.

Understanding the role of DevOps engineer includes recognizing the critical need for expertise DevOps practices and tools that streamline workflows and enhance system performance.

Useful link: Top 10 ‘Must’ Engineer Skills To Become DevOps-Powered!

Essential DevOps Tools for 2025 – A Must-Have List for Aspiring Engineers

As the field of DevOps continues to grow and transform, mastering the right tools becomes critical to acquiring the must-have skills for a DevOps engineer. For professionals aiming to advance their DevOps careers, understanding and utilizing these tools is essential to excelling and effectively demonstrating their DevOps experience.

Why Tools Are Crucial in the DevOps Career Path

To become a DevOps engineer, one must first recognize the importance of tools in streamlining workflows, automating tasks, and ensuring seamless collaboration between development and operations teams. These tools not only build your DevOps engineer skills but also showcase your expertise in DevOps to potential employers.

Top DevOps Tools to Master in 2025

1) Git and GitHub

Version control remains a cornerstone of DevOps skills. Git, paired with GitHub for collaboration, is a must-have tool for any DevOps professional. These tools enable version tracking, code collaboration, and streamlined deployment workflows.

2) Jenkins

Jenkins remains a leader in continuous integration and deployment. Its versatility and extensive plugin ecosystem make it indispensable for building CI/CD pipelines, a critical part of modern DevOps engineering skills.

3) Kubernetes

As container orchestration becomes increasingly critical, Kubernetes stands out as a vital tool for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. Proficiency in Kubernetes demonstrates strong skills for a DevOps engineer in 2025.

4) Docker

Containers are at the heart of modern DevOps practices. Docker allows developers to package and deploy applications consistently, bridging the gap between development and operations. Mastering Docker is vital for achieving expertise in DevOps.

5) Terraform

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform are gaining momentum. With Terraform, DevOps engineers can define and provision infrastructure programmatically, showcasing their DevOps experience in automating infrastructure.

6) Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana remain the go-to tools for monitoring and visualization. They help DevOps engineers track application performance and infrastructure health, which are essential components of the role of a DevOps engineer.

7) Ansible

Configuration management tools like Ansible automate repetitive tasks, ensuring consistency and reliability. Ansible is a key tool for enhancing automation, a vital aspect of DevOps engineering skills.

8) Azure DevOps and AWS DevOps Tools

Cloud-native DevOps practices are becoming a standard. Mastering cloud platform-specific tools, such as Azure DevOps and AWS CodePipeline, is crucial for demonstrating a comprehensive skill set in the DevOps career.

Useful link: DevOps Excellence: Strategies and Best Practices for CEOs and CTOs

DevOps Training

The role of a DevOps engineer doesn’t follow a single career path; professionals come to this position from diverse backgrounds. For instance, DevOps engineer skills might begin their journey as a software developer with responsibilities encompassing aspects of IT operations. Conversely, another DevOps engineer might transition from a system administrator role, leveraging their acquired knowledge of coding, scripting, integration, and testing. While there can be some overlap between DevOps and SysOps engineer job descriptions, depending on an organization’s specific needs, the responsibilities of DevOps engineers extend to reshaping business processes to solve organizational issues and enhance business outcomes.

• A solid background in OS administration, spanning platforms such as Linux and Windows.
• Proficiency with various automation and configuration management tools, encompassing traditional scripts and specialized tools like Puppet and Chef.
• A comprehensive grasp of coding and scripting in common languages, including Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby.
• Familiarity with at least one primary coding language, like C++ or Java.
• The ability to identify, evaluate, and integrate diverse open-source technologies and cloud services.
• A robust foundation in IT hardware and operations, featuring hands-on experience in server, storage, and network device setup, provisioning, and monitoring. This is typically complemented by knowledge of the best DevOps practices for fault tolerance and high-availability operations.
• Strong interpersonal and collaborative skills within a team environment and in customer-facing scenarios.
• Expertise in virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere for virtual machines (VMs) and proficiency with container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• Proven experience with CI/CD tools like Red Hat Ansible, Prometheus, Microsoft GitHub, Atlassian Jira, Confluence, and Jenkins.
• Practical familiarity with public cloud resources and services, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Familiarity with various IT monitoring and management tools like Cloudflare and Datadog.
• Proficiency in troubleshooting and resolving technical issues across test and production environments.

Some companies hiring DevOps engineers may include additional job requirements, such as security clearances, so reviewing specific job postings is essential. Typically, DevOps engineer roles have minimal formal education and training requirements, often including a bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering and certification in public cloud services such as AWS or Azure. DevOps hiring managers often emphasize that hands-on experience is irreplaceable in this field.

Want to take advantage of this highly-paid opportunity? You must excel in the following 10 areas, including a robust DevOps skillset.

Useful link: Future of DevOps: Top DevOps Trends in 2025 and Beyond

What Certifications Help You Become a DevOps Engineer?

Certifications are a critical stepping stone in your journey to becoming a DevOps engineer, as they showcase your expertise and reflect your dedication to excelling in a DevOps career. A recognized DevOps engineer certification boosts your resume and equips you with the essential DevOps skills required for success in this dynamic field.

Why Certifications Matter for a DevOps Career

To truly master the role of a DevOps engineer, you need to build a strong foundation of knowledge and practical experience. Certifications ensure you acquire the must-have skills for a DevOps engineer while showcasing your expertise in DevOps tools and practices to potential employers.

How Certifications Validate Tool Expertise

Earning relevant DevOps engineer certifications—such as AWS DevOps Engineer Professional or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)—proves your proficiency with these tools and enhances your marketability in the DevOps career field.

Key Certifications for DevOps Engineers

Here are some of the most recognized certifications that can help you develop the skills of a DevOps engineer and advance your DevOps career:

1) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

This certification focuses on deploying, managing, and automating applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It covers essential DevOps skills like CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (IaC).

2) Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

As containerization becomes a core part of modern DevOps practices, this certification demonstrates your proficiency in managing Kubernetes clusters—a vital skill for any aspiring DevOps engineer.

3) Docker Certified Associate (DCA)

Docker is a cornerstone of containerized application development. This certification highlights your ability to work effectively with Docker, a crucial aspect of gaining DevOps experience.

4) Microsoft Certified – Azure DevOps Engineer Expert

This certification is designed for Azure specialists, validating your proficiency in architecting and implementing DevOps methodologies.

5) HashiCorp Certified- Terraform Associate

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a core competency for DevOps engineer skills, and Terraform is a leading tool in this domain. This certification solidifies your knowledge of automating infrastructure provisioning.

How Certifications Complement Must-Have DevOps Skills

Earning certifications not only helps you understand how to become a DevOps engineer but also complements other must-have skills for a DevOps engineer, such as:

• Scripting and automation (e.g., Python, Bash).
• Configuration management (e.g., Ansible, Puppet).
• Monitoring and logging (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).

Combining Certifications with Real DevOps Experience

While certifications are invaluable, hands-on DevOps experience is equally important. Combining theoretical knowledge with practical application ensures you’re fully prepared for the challenges of a DevOps career.

Conclusion

DevOps is not merely a technology solution—it’s a culture. The deeper your understanding, the more you benefit from it. To thrive in the DevOps journey—whether as a professional, organization, or service provider—you need a willingness to embrace change, operational flexibility, and a potent blend of technical and interpersonal skills.

The ideal DevOps engineer combines a diverse skill set: a deep grasp of development and IT operations, mastery of automation and configuration tools, programming proficiency, expertise in cloud platforms and containerization, solid hardware, and networking knowledge, and exceptional collaboration and problem-solving capabilities. This well-rounded combination enables seamless integration of development and operations, accelerating delivery and boosting efficiency in modern software development.

As a trusted industry leader, Veritis has a proven track record of delivering world-class DevOps services and solutions. Our recognition as a Stevie and Globee Business Awards winner reflects our unwavering commitment to quality and innovation. With over 20 years of experience backed by AWS, Azure, and GCP-certified consultants, Veritis ensures 100% client satisfaction and quality in every engagement. Partner with us to unlock your DevOps potential and drive transformative success in today’s competitive digital landscape.
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