DevOps advocacy is often undervalued or overlooked entirely, but is arguably the most important role of a DevOps engineer. The shift to a DevOps culture can be disruptive and confusing to the engineering team members. As the DevOps subject matter expert, it falls to the DevOps engineer to help evangelize and educate the DevOps way across the organization. You and your teams can build and test changes, add to repositories, and deploy updates quickly and efficiently. Within an agile environment, developers, system administrators, and programmers can be siloed, working on the same product but not sharing information necessary to ensure value to the user.
These skillsets may include knowledge of programming languages, proficiency with automation tools, interpersonal skills, and analytical problem solving. DevOps is a practice that requires a cultural change, new management principles, and the use of technology tools. A DevOps engineer lies at the heart of a DevOps transformation and must have a broad set of skills to facilitate this change. Yet most organizations will need more than just one DevOps engineer, but a mix of generalists and specialists to work closely with each other to implement DevOps and improve the software development lifecycle. A DevOps engineer helps to break down silos to facilitate collaboration among different experts and across toolchains to realize the full promise of DevOps. A DevOps engineer’s end goal is to shorten the software development process, increase the frequency of software releases, unite operations teams and development teams, and facilitate more dependable releases.
Jira Service Management
Organizations with these qualified professionals can ensure speedy delivery of secure, compliant, systems that are highly available and scalable. The future of DevOps engineering looks bright, but it isn’t something anyone can just jump into. DevOps engineering is rewarding, challenging, and offers an opportunity to learn and evolve. To become a DevOps engineer typically calls for a tertiary qualification in computer science or a related area of study. Soft skills also are recommended, enabling engineers to collaborate with different teams and departments, and communicate effectively and clearly with customers and colleagues on the business side of the company.
Release engineering includes the work required to build and deploy application code. The exact tools and processes vary widely depending on many variables, such as what language the code is written in, how much of the pipeline has been automated, and whether the production infrastructure is on-premise or in the cloud. Release engineering might entail selecting, provisioning, and maintaining CI/CD tooling or writing and maintaining bespoke build/deploy scripts. A DevOps engineer must know how to manage the IT infrastructure that supports software code in dedicated, multitenant or hybrid cloud computing environments. They might have to provision resources, select an appropriate deployment model, direct testing to validate each release and monitor performance after release.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
By automating processes used in application maintenance and management, DevOps engineers enable seamless operations between different processes and development stages. This enables continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, and the delivery of high-quality, well-tested code. Traditionally, the roles of software developers and IT operations staff were siloed and highly isolated.
Agile and DevOps both prioritize collaboration, continuous improvement, and delivering working software. Agile emphasizes iterative development and customer satisfaction, while DevOps emphasizes automating processes and integrating development and operations teams. When used together, Agile and DevOps can improve software development and delivery by streamlining processes and enhancing collaboration. The role of DevOps engineer doesn’t fall along one career track; professionals evolve into the position from a variety of backgrounds.
What skills are required to be a DevOps engineer?
DevOps engineers facilitate cross-team collaboration to help all teams work together toward a common goal. These project management and communication skills also enable DevOps engineers to cooperate with colleagues in various departments, such as the C-Suite, finance and marketing. A DevOps engineer is an IT professional that that manages an organization’s developer operations (DevOps), which includes all the practices and tools that the organization uses to create and manage software. Most DevOps engineer roles require at least a bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science or a related field, though some employers may accept equivalent work experience. Educational institutions can’t teach DevOps well because this work bridges development and operations.
- DevOps engineer candidates are often expected to have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, IT, software engineering or a similar field.
- Organizations with these qualified professionals can ensure speedy delivery of secure, compliant, systems that are highly available and scalable.
- The term ‘DevOps’ is derived from «development and operations» and is a set of practices aiming to increase the efficiency of the software development lifecycle through collaboration.
- These are the people who have been historically described as “computer programmers” before the rise of agile thinking.
Explore tools and resources that make it easier for your devops engineer trainings to effectively transform your organization’s technology and processes. Build and ship enterprise applications, manage large teams, and apply policies and security controls across the organization with GitHub Enterprise. DevOps engineers can start with an entry-level system administrator, support, or help desk role to gain experience with software maintenance.
Advanced Developing on AWS
Developers want to introduce new features to an application, while operations teams want to preserve the stability of an application once it is released. A DevOps engineer optimizes an organization’s software delivery process to enable collaboration and innovation. Keep reading to learn more about what DevOps engineers do and what skills they rely on. Organizations that haven’t embraced the notion of fully integrating security and compliance concerns into their planning and development processes will often have an individual or team that is responsible for security. This often proves to be an antipattern because it makes security an afterthought, and it is much harder to secure software after it has been designed, built, and deployed than it is to design with security in mind.
For example, a DevOps engineer might start as a software developer who oversees aspects of IT operations. Conversely, a DevOps engineer might move up from a system administrator role after they’ve gained knowledge about coding, scripting, integration and testing. The goal of a DevOps engineer is to reduce the complexity of the system development life cycle.
Common interview questions for DevOps engineers
Most professionals embracing DevOps culture combine tools and practices with years of enterprise IT experience. Think about acquiring knowledge outside of your skill set—and maybe outside of your team— in order to gain the holistic view needed to become a DevOps engineer. DevOps processes such as CI/CD security can be used to safeguard code pipelines with automated checks and testing to prevent vulnerabilities in software delivery. Development teams and IT operations teams can have different skills and different goals.
DevOps engineers should have extensive experience with software tools and coding languages. To obtain this experience, you can work in IT, system administration, or software development. The purpose of such roles is to ensure that any new application software being released into production meets quality and security standards and has the appropriate management approvals. At the same time, developers may need support from DevOps engineers when working to improve the process of building and deploying application code. The technical skills required of a DevOps engineer will vary depending on the team structure, technologies, and toolsets in use. It’s also important for a DevOps engineer to have a solid understanding of all the components of a delivery pipeline, and to know the pros and cons of available tools and services.
Yet one of the most common hurdles to implementing DevOps is a lack of skills in employees, according to Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps Trends Survey. Check out these resources from AWS Training and Certification that are relevant to AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional. There are a variety of technical training offerings an IT professional can pursue to earn a DevOps certification. These range from introductory courses for those who are new to DevOps to advanced training courses for those who wish to become lead DevOps engineers. There are also courses specific to the DevOps tools an organization already uses as well as a broad range of emerging technologies.
