What does a DevOps engineer do? How to Become One?

DevOps is no magic, but it can definitely look like it from the outside. In today’s corporate world, workers in innovative fields are generating new roles for themselves. The role of the DevOps Engineer is one instance of such.

There’s a lot of misconception regarding who is a DevOps Engineer – are they the person who writes the code? Or are they responsible for the work of a system engineer? 

Well! Not exactly. Through this post, I shall guide you through the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer. But first, let us know what DevOps is.

What is DevOps?

It is a combination of Development and Operations. DevOps is the blend of cultural philosophies, tools, and practices that increase an organization’s ability to deliver services and applications quickly. It helps them upgrade products faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management procedures.

This speed facilitates organizations to serve their customers better and compete more efficiently in the market.

DevOps culture is introduced to improve collaboration, communication, and agile relations between the operations and software development teams. It bridges the gap between the development and operations teams.

Sometimes, the two teams work as one team where the engineers work through the entire application lifecycle, from development to test and deployment to operations. They develop a set of skills required for both software development and operations.

Simply put, DevOps is a set of practices that combine Software Development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), which intend to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.

Unlike popular opinions, DevOps is not:

• a combination of the Development and Operations team.
• a tool or a product.
• a separate team.
• automation.

However, it is a process that includes continuous:

• Integration
• Development
• Testing
• Deployment
• Monitoring

What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is a professional who bridges software developers, system operators, and other production IT staff and supervises code releases and deployments. They require a rich set of hard and soft skills to bypass the communication barrier between software development, testing, and IT operations teams by fostering a collaborative environment.

The primary goal of DevOps engineers is to shorten the development cycle and enable releasing updates quickly.

A DevOps Engineer is truly a revival of the cloud infrastructure IT services. It is often strenuous to understand their role because they are the product of the dynamic workforce that has not yet finished evolving.

These professionals come from a multitude of IT backgrounds and begin the role in different places in their careers. Generally, their role is not as easy as it appears. It requires looking into seamless team integration and successfully and continuously deploying the code.

Furthermore, the DevOps approach to software development requires recurring, incremental changes, and engineers seldom code from scratch. However, they must understand the fundamentals of software development languages and thoroughly use the development tools to make a new code or update the existing one.

Understanding the Role of a DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineers work in conjunction with the development team and help in coding and scripting to connect the elements of the application under development, such as software development kits (SDKs) or libraries. Further, they help integrate other components, such as messaging tools or SQL data management, to run the software release with operating systems and production infrastructure.

They should be able to manage the IT infrastructure in accordance with the supported software code dedicated to multi-tenant or hybrid cloud environments. There’s a need to have a facility for required resources, procuring the appropriate deployment model, validating the release, and monitoring performance.

Further, DevOps engineers could either be the system administrators who have moved into the coding domain or the developers who have moved into operations. Either way, it is a cross-function role that sees a huge upward trajectory in how software is developed and deployed in object-critical applications.

It isn’t rare for DevOps to be called to mentor software developers and architecture teams within an organization to educate them about how to create easily scalable software. They also work with the security teams and IT to ensure quality releases. Some DevOps teams include DevSecOps, which bids DevOps principles to drive security measures.

The DevOps Engineer is a significant IT team member who works with an internal customer. This includes software and application developers, QC personnel, project managers, and stakeholders, usually from the same organization.

They rarely work with end-users but keep a “customer first” mindset to comply with the needs of their internal clients. They are customer-service-oriented team players who can arise from a number of different work and educational backgrounds. Still, through their vivid experience, they have developed the right skill set to move into DevOps.

Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

Typically, the role of a DevOps engineer is as follows:

• Work with a variety of open-source tools and technologies for managing source codes.
• Deploying multiple automation tools to perfection.
• Continuous iteration of software development and testing.
• Connect to business and technical goals with alacrity.
• Analyze code and communicate descriptive reviews to development teams to ensure a marked improvement in applications and on-time completion of projects.
• Design, develop, and implement software integrations based on user reviews.
• Apply cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) computing skills to deploy upgrades and fixes.
• Troubleshoot production problems and coordinate with the development team to streamline code deployment.
• Conduct systems tests for performance, availability, and security.
• Collaborate with team members to improve the company’s engineering tools, data security, systems, and procedures.
• Optimize the company’s computing architecture.
• Troubleshooting documentation.
• Implement automation tools and frameworks (CI/CD pipelines).
• Develop and maintain design.
• Understand the needs and difficulties of a client across development and operations.
• Formulate solutions that support business, technical strategies, and the organization’s goals.
• Develop solutions encompassing technology, process, and people for continuous delivery, build and release management, infrastructure strategy & operations, and a basic understanding of networking and security.
• Implement and recommend solutions.
• Expertise and knowledge in current and emerging processes, techniques, and tools.
• Build the DevOps practice within ThoughtWorks and drive our thought leadership externally.
• Timely identification and resolution of problems.
• Design, develop, and maintain the CI/CD tools and infrastructure to deliver Horizon Cloud Service.

Skills Required to Become a DevOps Engineer

Besides the essential skills, DevOps engineers should hold a bachelor’s degree in engineering, computer science, or a relevant field. In addition, they require 3+ years’ experience in the software engineering role.

Let us now dive deep into the essential skills.

• Sound knowledge of operating systems, such as Windows and Linux.
• Expertise in automation and configuration tools (Puppet, Chef, and Ansible).
• Profound understanding of software development methodologies.
• Experience in server, network, and application status monitoring.
• Ability to maintain Java web applications
• Strong command of software-automation production systems (Selenium and Jenkins).
• Knowledge of scripting languages like Python, PHP, Perl, or Ruby and well-known DevOps tools like Git and GitHub.
• Experience with coding languages, such as C++ or Java.
• Working knowledge of various databases like SQL (Structured Query Language).
• Knowledge of virtualization technologies, like VMware vSphere, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Working knowledge of CI/CD tools, such as Jenkins, Atlassian, JIRA, and Red Hat Ansible.
• Problem-solving attitude.

How to Become a DevOps Engineer?

Earn a Bachelor’s Degree

To become a DevOps engineer, it is essential to have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, or any other related field. Many companies have a prerequisite for DevOps engineers to hold a bachelor’s degree.

There is another way to become a DevOps engineer, and that is opting for online courses. This way is ideal if you do not possess a bachelor’s degree.

Develop Essential Skills

DevOps engineers have multiple responsibilities and must possess a rich set of skills. Go through the above skills and work on developing and practicing them to be proficient and well-versed.

Earn a DevOps Certification

Certifications provide credibility and serve as proof of your expertise and skills. Earning DevOps certifications will help you boost your resume, land a job easily, and provide more career opportunities.

A few popular DevOps certifications are:

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Docker Certified Associate (DCA)
• Puppet Certified Professional
• Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert

Work as an Intern

If you want to gain work experience, you must consider working as an intern. You will get to learn many practical skills and understand how to work as a DevOps engineer in the real world.

Conclusion

It is essential to understand that a DevOps engineer is built out of the growing needs of the business to get a tighter hold of the cloud infrastructure in a hybrid environment. Organizations implementing DevOps skills yield better advantages, such as spending relatively less time on configuration management and faster deployment of applications.

The demand for DevOps engineers is growing exponentially because businesses get great outputs from DevOps. Organizations utilizing DevOps practices are overwhelmingly high-functioning.

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Frequently Asked Questions

1. Does a DevOps engineer do coding?

Yes, a DevOps engineer needs to do coding and scripting to automate tasks and work with code repositories. They must have knowledge of various programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, C++, and Go. 

2. What are the skills of a DevOps engineer?

The essential skills of a DevOps Engineer are Linux fundamentals, working knowledge of CI/CD tools, configuration management tools, containers, and version control tools, coding and scripting, cloud computing, automation, testing, security, monitoring, and containerization, 

3. What is the average salary of a DevOps engineer?

According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a DevOps engineer is $1.1 lakhs per annum in the United States. 

4. Who earns more DevOps or developers?

A DevOps engineer earns more than developers, as they manage both the development and operations.