DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer is now a buzzword for IT industries and career options. DevOps Engineer is one of the emerging career options to be in more demand in the upcoming days. 

Looking at the effectiveness of the DevOps approach, now most IT companies have started adopting the DevOps methodology. The trend for approaching DevOps by development companies is now giving ample opportunity to DevOps Engineers. Several online platforms and institutions are now providing DevOps certification. 

Do you want to be a DevOps Engineer?. But don’t know about the skills required to be a DevOps Engineer.

Then this Blog is for you. Here we will discuss those skills you need to be a DevOps Engineer.

Before moving to the skills, first, let’s know

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a development strategy that connects the gap between software development and IT operations. DevOps integrates developers and operations teams to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflow and continuously measuring application performance. The purpose of DevOps teams is to automate everything, from testing of new code to provisioning of infrastructure.

What exactly does a DevOps Engineer do?

A DevOps engineer works with IT developers to accelerate better coordination among operations, development, and testing teams by automating and streamlining the integration and deployment processes.

Specifically, it is a multitask role who can demonstrate flexibility and can deal with many different situations.

The responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer include:

Development: 

A DevOps engineer works with development teams to tackle the necessary coding and scripting to balance needs throughout the software development life cycle, from coding and deployment to installations and configurations.

Project planning:

A DevOps team plays a major role in planning a project. They share their knowledge of system options, risk, impact, and ROI. In addition, they communicate operational requirements and development forecasts.

Performance management:

By analysing the gaps in the process, a DevOps personnel recommends performance enhancements, identifies alternatives solutions and assists with modification.

Management:

Depending upon the company’s size, the DevOps engineer takes responsibility for managing a team of DevOps engineers.

Documentation:

Documentation promotes standardisation of best practices and sets organisations to capture and benchmark metrics for the quality of code. Depending upon the organisation’s DevOps team, they write specifications and documentation for the server-side features.

Systems analysis:

By analysing the recent technology, DevOps Engineer plans and processes for improvement and expansion. They provide support for urgent analytic needs.

Testing:

Testing in the DevOps cycle is an automated process that gives feedback at every checkpoint. DevOps team test codes and identify ways to streamline and minimise errors.

Deployment:

DevOps uses configuration management software to deploy updates automatically and fixes into the production environment.

Maintenance:

DevOps Engineer Performs routine application maintenance to ensure the production environment runs smoothly. 

Now let’s check about the skills you need to be a DevOps Engineer.

Communication and Collaboration Skills:

DevOps brings a collaborative approach to development, testing and deployment teams. It brings different teams with varying objectives to work together towards efficient and high-quality releases. DevOps Engineers need to speak regularly with the internal management team and have to stay familiar with the objectives, roadmap, blocking issues and other project areas. Along with that, they need to communicate effectively with customers regarding support issues. To avoid barriers among the teams, having excellent communication skills is important to be a successful DevOps engineer.

Linux Fundamental:

Linux is a free open-source operating system released under the General Public Licence. An operating system is simply software that directly manages a system’s hardware and resources like CPU, memory and storage. The operating system lies between the application and hardware and makes connections with all of your software and the physical resources that you work on. In Linux anyone can run, study, modify and redistribute the source code or even sell copies of their modified code as long as they work under the same licence.

 Let’s take an example of an operating system of a car engine. An engine of a car can run on its own but it comes to functionality when it is connected with transmission, axles and wheels. The rest won’t work without the car running properly. Many DevOps tools in the configuration management space like ansible and puppet have their architecture based on Linux. These tools help in provisioning and managing infrastructure automatically with the help of any scripting languages like Ruby and Python. So Linux is a key concept in DevOps to get started with infrastructure and automation.

Source Code Management-

Source code management is used to track modification to a code repository. It tracks a running history of changes to the codebase and helps to resolve conflicts while merging updates from multiple contributors. As software projects grow in lines of code and contributor numbers, the costs of communicating and managing them grow as well. So, Source Code Management is a critical tool for reducing the organisational strain caused by rising development costs. 

When multiple developers work within a shared codebase it is a common occurrence to make edits to a shared piece of code. Before the adoption of Source code management, Developers edit text files directly and move them around to remote locations using FTP or other protocols. Let’s say 2 developers are working within a shared codebase. If Developer 1 will make edits and Developer 2 would unknowingly save over Developer 1’s work and wipe out the changes. It will lead to loss of work due to conflict overwriting. In Order to prevent this loss, Source code management acts as a protection mechanism. It safeguards work by tracking changes from each individual developer and identifying areas of conflict and preventing overwrites.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery: 

A better understanding of continuous integration and continuous delivery approaches helps to deliver a high-quality product to the client faster. Continuous is one of the best practices in the DevOps cycle. Whenever a developer finishes a functionality, they integrate a new code with the existing codebase continuously. This basically helps to save a lot of time during the integration phase of the project. So this practice helps to detect integration issues in the early stage itself and make the work of developers easier. Continuous Delivery on the other hand comes as an extension to continuous integration since the newly integrated code is made ready for deployment automatically without human intervention. Jenkins and Docker are popular tools for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

Infrastructure as Code:

It is the management of Infrastructure in a descriptive model using the same versioning as the DevOps team uses for source code. Infrastructure as Code enables the DevOps team to test applications in the production environment of the development cycle. This team expects to provision multiple test environments reliably and on-demand. It is represented as the code that can be validated and tested to prevent common deployment issues.

Infrastructure as Code ensures continuity as all the environments are provisioned and configured automatically with no space for human error, which speeds up and simplifies software development and Infrastructure Operations. Terraform and CHEF, Ansible are some of the popular Infrastructure as Code tools.

Knowledge of Automation Tools:

It is extremely important for a DevOps Engineer to have knowledge of Automation tools. Automation is the key to the development process. It allows reduced human effort, which boosts speed, accuracy, improves consistency and reliability while minimising the number of errors. Eventually, it results in more Rapide with high-quality delivery of value to the customer. Puppet, Docker and Jenkins are the most popular automation tools.

Continuous Testing:

Continuous Testing is the way to speed up and support the DevOps CI/CD pipelines. Continuous means successive testing is done on a continuous basis. It includes the practices, processes and tools of testing early, often, everywhere and automation. For Example, whenever a developer checks the code in the Source Code Server, an automated set of unit tests are executed in the continuous process. If the tests fail, the build gets rejected and is notified to the developer. Upon passing the test, the build is deployed to performance and QA servers for exhaustive functional and load tests. The tests are run at the same time. If it passes the tests, the software is deployed in production.

Containerization:

Containerization is the new standard in DevOps. Containerization is the process of packaging software code, its required dependencies, configurations, and other details to deploy easily in the same or other computing environments. Containerization enables DevOps Engineers, developers, and system administrators to build, test, deploy, and maintain applications quickly, securely, and efficiently.

Cloud Service Knowledge:

As Cloud and DevOps are always together, a DevOps Engineer must have Cloud knowledge. The efficiency of one is directly related to and influenced by the efficiency of the other. The DevOps methodology drives a process, and the cloud enables it by providing the platform needed to test, deploy, and release code.

Continuous Monitoring:

It is an automated process by which DevOps Engineers can observe and notice compliance issues and security threats during each phase of the DevOps pipeline. 

It comes in at the end of the DevOps pipeline. Once the software is released into production, Continuous Monitoring will notify development and QA teams regarding the specific issues arising in the production environment. It provides feedback on issues, which allows the relevant teams to work on the issues and fix them as soon as possible. Continuous Monitoring helps IT teams and DevOps teams, with procuring real-time data from public and hybrid environments, which helps them with implementing and fortifying various security measures – incident response, threat assessment, computers, database forensics, and root cause analysis.

Conclusion:

DevOps is not only a technology solution rather it is a culture. The more you understand the more you will be benefitted. DevOps depends on individuals across various functions working together toward the same objective — to deliver rapid, continuous and high-quality code.

To be a successful DevOps Engineer, all you need to focus on is the above skills. 

The trend for DevOps is now leading day by day. Looking at the effectiveness of DevOps, now even small and medium IT organisations are adopting DevOps in their development cycle. If you want to make your career in DevOps, then it is the best career option.