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 makes it popular, resulting in reduced time to market and improved end-user satisfaction.
Given these benefits, DevOps has become the need of the hour for many leading enterprises. Even small and medium companies are pursuing DevOps. All they need is the skills and expertise of a DevOps engineer!
Do you know? DevOps is one of the top most-wanted technology roles that the US IT industry is looking for! The need for DevOps skills is increasing. DevOps is like a bridge that connects software development and operations teams. It breaks down barriers between these departments and speeds up how quickly software is created and implemented. This is a significant advantage for businesses at all levels, and it has made 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.
DevOps engineer skills are crucial in ensuring the constant integration, delivery, and deployment of software, improving organizational efficiency and competitiveness. Possessing a wide-ranging skill set is vital to thriving in this ever-changing domain and securing a role as a DevOps engineer.
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 has to have the aptitude to communicate and collaborate. While courses on coding and testing are vital to DevOps engineer skills, communication skills are essential to a successful DevOps engineer.
What is DevOps?
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 well-known 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 skills typically possess a profound grasp of development and operations procedures, enabling them to function 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 aim to uphold its reliability post-release.
DevOps revolves around streamlining and automating processes, and DevOps engineers play a pivotal role in integrating code, application upkeep, and management. These responsibilities necessitate understanding development life cycles and grasping the DevOps culture, encompassing 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 might hire professionals to “do DevOps” within their workflows. Still, since successful DevOps adoption hinges on cultural and procedural changes, this approach can exacerbate the disconnect between developers and operational teams.
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 encompass provisioning resources, selecting suitable deployment models, overseeing testing procedures to validate each software release, and monitoring performance post-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 the ground up, they need to possess a fundamental grasp of software development languages and be well-acquainted with the tools used to create or alter code. They collaborate with development teams to address the coding and scripting necessary for connecting various application components, such as APIs, libraries, and software development kits (SDKs). Additionally, they integrate other elements like 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 like 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 such as performance monitoring, diagnostics, failover, and ensuring high availability while evaluating risks for all changes within the environment.
Useful link: Top 10 ‘Must’ Engineer Skills To Become DevOps-Powered!
DevOps Training, Skills, and Certifications
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 based on the organization’s specific needs, the DevOps engineers’ responsibilities extend to reshaping business processes to solve organizational issues and enhance business outcomes.
Despite the varied nature of DevOps engineer roles, specific skills required for DevOps engineer positions and attributes are crucial for prospective job candidates to emphasize in their pursuit of employment. These include:
- 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 prerequisites, often encompassing a bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering and certification in public cloud services like 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 2023 and Beyond
Top 10 Skills Required for DevOps Engineer Professionals
1) Communication and Collaboration
Given its basic nature, communication and collaboration are crucial to succeeding in the DevOps competition. These two are very important to break down the siloes between Dev and Ops teams, aligning teams’ goals to business objectives, and implementing DevOps culture cross-functionally.
2) Soft Skills and Noble Thought
It’s not enough if you are just good at coding and automation. DevOps skills need a different you who is also good at soft skills, self-motivation, flexibility, and learning. DevOps professionals should be the doers as well as listeners.
They should be clear that DevOps transformation involves stakeholder discussions, awareness about business goals, assessment, and identification of improvement areas, all driven by collaboration.
3) Understanding of Relevant Tools
Success in DevOps purely depends on the toolset involved during different phases of its implementation. It’s hard even to count the number of tools DevOps brought in. However, the significance of making DevOps practices successful should be discussed in detail.
4) Security Skills
The rate of risks often matches the speed of deployment that DevOps facilitates. Given this constraint, security at the end or as a separate process in the traditional method might not work. This is where DevSecOps is an advantage in integrating security with SDLC right from the start.
So, DevSecOps skillset will be an added advantage to success as a DevOps professional.
5) Automation Skills
Being called a DevOps engineer will require a good command over automation, which is the heart of the DevOps skills process. A DevOps engineer should be capable of automating the entire DevOps pipeline, including CI/CD cycles, app performance monitoring, infrastructure, and configurations.
Skillset is closely linked to ability in knowledge about DevOps toolset, coding, and scripting.
Useful link: DevOps outsourcing: Things to Know About Before Getting Started
6) Coding and Scripting
Coding and scripting are two critical skills that DevOps engineers should possess. Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, PHP, Bash, Shell, and Node.js are the most recommended programming/scripting languages.
Linux is one of the operating environments that hardcore developers continue to use today. There is plenty of freedom to operate around, and this flexibility is favorable to DevOps engineers globally. So, while every DevOps engineer doesn’t always use Linux, it will undoubtedly be used by every DevOps engineer at some point in their career.
Learning the fundamentals of Linux, such as connecting to a server and creating and editing files, is not difficult. This qualifies as common knowledge. However, it may take years to become an expert DevOps engineer. While it is not a strictly required skill, large organizations frequently remain with well-known, well-established Linux distributions, typically because they want to support and the programs they wish to employ are only approved for usage on these well-known distributors. Various courses are available on the web, typically from Red Hat. One can enroll in one of them and get cracking with coding and scripting.
7) Cloud Skills
Cloud and DevOps are always together. One’s efficiency is directly dependent on and influenced by the other. While DevOps methodology drives a process, the cloud enables it by providing the necessary platform to perform tests, deploy, and release code.
Cloud enables DevOps automation with the required CI/CD toolset and facilitates a resource monitoring mechanism.
8) Testing Skills
Testing is crucial to DevOps success. The DevOps automation pipeline will need tests that run well without fail. This is important for continuous testing, where automated tests are executed. Automated test cases make the process faster and ensure quality delivery to the end-user.
9) Customer-Focused Approach
Customer satisfaction is the end goal of any successful DevOps process. Given this, DevOps professionals should ensure that every function they perform follows business objectives and delivers value to the end user.
They must collaborate with stakeholders, such as developers, testers, project managers, and the organization’s thought leadership, towards a common goal.
10) Proactiveness
DevOps engineers/pros will need proactiveness and passion towards work, which directly reflects performance and productivity. Moreover, staying updated with relevant technologies, new tools, and more is part of your process. Passion and Proactiveness make you a successful DevOps professional.
Conclusion
DevOps is merely a culture, not a technology solution. The more you understand, the more beneficiary it will be. But to succeed in the DevOps journey as a professional, company, or service provider, you need openness to change, flexibility in operations, and a combination of hard and soft skills.
The “perfect” DevOps engineer possesses a unique blend of skills and attributes encompassing a deep understanding of development and operations, proficiency in automation and configuration management tools, coding expertise, cloud and containerization proficiency, robust hardware and network knowledge, and effective collaboration and troubleshooting abilities. Such a multifaceted skill set enables them to excel in orchestrating the seamless integration of development and IT operations, ultimately driving efficiency and success in modern software development.
As an industry leader, Veritis has consistently demonstrated its commitment to delivering top-tier DevOps services. Our recognition as a Stevie and Globee Business Awards winner underscores our dedication to excellence in the field. Veritis offers a comprehensive range of services, making them an ideal partner for firms seeking to harness the power of DevOps to enhance their software development processes and achieve tremendous success in today’s competitive landscape.
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