What Is a DevOps Engineer? How to Become One, Salary, Skills

When a software release candidate was ready for deployment, it was formally handed off to IT. IT was responsible for understanding the software’s resource and performance requirements and then deploying, configuring and managing that workload in production. By integrating security into a continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment pipeline, DevSecOps is an active, integrated part of the development process.

This makes it easier for organizations to govern changes over resources and ensure that security measures are properly enforced in a distributed manner (e.g. information security or compliance with PCI-DSS or HIPAA). This allows teams within an organization to move at higher velocity since non-compliant resources can be automatically flagged for further investigation or even automatically brought back into compliance. You can adopt a DevOps model without sacrificing security by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques.

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Teams can build the DevOps toolchain they want, thanks to integrations with leading vendors and marketplace apps. Because we believe teams should work the way they want, rather than the way vendors want. These soft skills are critical in getting everyone on your DevOps team to work together. As a DevOps Engineer, you’ll need the ability to encourage a collaborative culture — even among people who are used to working solo. Continuous integration involves changes to code being built and tested then merged with the rest of the program using a shared repository like GitHub. A DevOps Engineer may be charged with overseeing these changes to avoid interrupting continuous integration.

Increased communication and collaboration in an organization is one of the key cultural aspects of DevOps. The use of DevOps tooling and automation of the software delivery process establishes collaboration by physically bringing together the workflows and responsibilities of development and operations. Building on top of that, these teams set strong cultural norms around information sharing and facilitating communication through the use of chat applications, issue or project tracking systems, and devops engineer training wikis. This helps speed up communication across developers, operations, and even other teams like marketing or sales, allowing all parts of the organization to align more closely on goals and projects. Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production. It expands upon continuous integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment and/or a production environment after the build stage.

Roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer

Ensure the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so you can reliably deliver at a more rapid pace while maintaining a positive experience for end users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Tasks like data management and library updates for new product releases combine with needs for leadership and collaboration across teams. It is important for DevOps engineers to understand the fundamentals of application development and delivery. A DevOps engineer introduces processes, tools, and methodologies to balance needs throughout the software development life cycle, from coding and deployment, to maintenance and updates. Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product.

Mastery of popular DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Prometheus opens doors to career advancement and specialization. DevOps engineers can become subject matter experts (SMEs) in specific tools or platforms, contributing to tool development, consulting, or training roles within organizations or as independent consultants. A DevOps engineer’s roles and responsibilities are a combination of technical and management roles. It is essential to have excellent communication and coordination skills to successfully integrate various functions in a coordinated manner and deliver the responsibilities to the customer’s satisfaction. This guide provides comprehensive information about the roadmap to career development as a DevOps engineer, the technology involved, and the skills required for performing a DevOps engineer’s responsibility.

Importance of DevOps Engineers

DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation. DevOps engineers need to have a strong software development or IT operations background, along with a mix of other technical skills and soft skills from other disciplines. These skillsets include knowledge of programming languages, automation tools, interpersonal skills, and analytical problem solving. Most DevOps engineers possess a strong software development or IT operations background, along with a mix of other technical skills and soft skills from other disciplines.

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. Development teams and IT operations teams can have different skills and different goals. Developers want to introduce new features to an application, while operations teams want to preserve the stability of an application once it is released. The easiest way to get started with DevOps is to identify a small value stream (for example a small supporting app or service) and start experimenting with some DevOps practices. As with software development, it is far easier to transform a single stream with a small group of stakeholders than to attempt an all-at-once organizational transition to a new way of working. Agile methodologies are immensely popular in the software industry since they empower teams to be inherently flexible, well-organized, and capable of responding to change.

Diverse Career Paths

Although DevOps engineers rarely code from scratch, they must understand the basics of software development languages and be familiar with the development tools used to create new code or update existing code. DevOps engineers play a crucial role in bridging the gap between traditionally siloed departments to enable more consistency and effective collaboration. They often serve as the link between development teams and IT operations teams to help unify, optimize, and automate processes within the software development lifecycle. Because teams have different skillsets and goals, a DevOps engineer’s job is to balance the needs and goals of all teams and find solutions that enable everyone to do their best work. The role of DevOps engineer doesn’t fall along one career track; professionals evolve into the position from a variety of backgrounds.

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. Infrastructure as code is a practice in which infrastructure is provisioned and managed using code and software development techniques, such as version control and continuous integration. The cloud’s API-driven model enables developers and system administrators to interact with infrastructure programmatically, and at scale, instead of needing to manually set up and configure resources.

The DevOps evangelist will typically have a strong technical background, but the focus of the role is on interpersonal communication and process improvement. When an organization is rooted in a siloed structure where development and operations work separately, implementing DevOps often entails an organizational overhaul. 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. The microservices architecture is a design approach to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs in its own process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism, typically an HTTP-based application programming interface (API).

A DevOps engineer optimizes an organization’s software delivery process to enable collaboration and innovation. Working with cutting-edge tools and systems, a DevOps engineer’s goal is to shorten the software development cycle, increase update frequency, and allow for more dependable releases. In this program, you will build the DevOps skills required to automate the various aspects and stages of machine learning model building and monitoring. DevOps engineers may begin their careers as a product developer, software developer or software engineer before entering the DevOps engineer role. Professionals can then progress into a senior DevOps engineer role, and eventually management and leadership positions like DevOps engineering manager. DevOps engineers are responsible for selecting, implementing, and managing a wide array of tools and technologies that comprise the DevOps toolchain.

The most fundamental function of any CI/CD tool or set of tools is to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software. 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.

• As a result, the final product is more effective, and you save time because each component jives with the others.
• A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment.
• A DevOps Engineer may be charged with overseeing these changes to avoid interrupting continuous integration.
• Move at high velocity so you can innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better, and grow more efficient at driving business results.
• A DevOps engineer should go beyond writing automation scripts and understand advanced software development practices and how to implement agile development practices such as code reviews and using source control.