Development and operations teams traditionally have had distinct business objectives. Engineers want to develop new features and get them to users as fast as possible. Operations teams, on the other hand, want to keep systems stable and operational, which favors a conservative approach to updates. These goals often conflict.
DevOps engineers serve as liaisons between these two teams, ensuring continuous updates and deployments are managed in a way that doesn’t compromise stability. In this sense, they function as a leader for both teams, keeping everyone aligned toward the same goal.
Continuous integration and delivery
DevOps engineers automate the software development process as much as possible. This involves implementing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines that allow for faster and more frequent releases of software. CI/CD pipelines involve automated testing, building and deployment processes that allow developers to quickly and easily push code changes to production.
Infrastructure management
Along with a deep understanding of development and operations principles, DevOps engineers often serve as cloud architects, working with infrastructure that’s managed through code. This infrastructure is where software is deployed and run, and it often requires finely-tuned integrations to function at peak performance.
Making sure company data is safe and secure is one of the key aspects of DevOps work. They integrate security measures with software processes and ensure that updates don’t create any vulnerabilities. Because DevOps engineers use so much automation in their daily work, keeping information secure by identifying possible breaches and addressing them is especially important.
Monitoring and testing
DevOps engineers run tests on the effectiveness and efficiency of various software tools. This is also known as quality assurance or QA software testing. They assess how well each programming method works in the context of its task. Testing helps DevOps engineers identify infrastructure flaws and draft code to solve a problem or alert team members to start working on a solution.
The tools and technologies used by DevOps engineers
The work of DevOps engineers requires expertise across a variety of tools, technologies and methodologies. Cloud-based platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are standard. The same goes for containerization tools, such as Docker and Kubernetes, which automate the deployment of servers.
DevOps engineers also require expert-level knowledge of the following tools and methodologies:
Source and version control using git
Linux-based operating systems
Various programming languages
Automated code testing tools and techniques
Agile and Scrum development methodologies
Requirements
Technical skills
The technical side of cloud computing has evolved into what’s known as serverless technologies. Rather than powering virtual servers, a serverless approach uses code to specify the computing resources necessary for the corresponding software to function. AWS and Azure are just a couple of platforms that use this approach. It’s an approach that necessitates considerable technical acumen, and it’s essential to most DevOps engineering roles.
This also entails deep expertise in containerization techniques and tooling. A big part of a DevOps engineer’s role is automating the tasks of infrastructure configuration, server deployment and software setup. Containerization tools allow them to create predefined setups that are far easier and quicker to set up than a virtual server.
Meanwhile, these versatile engineers also need development-level expertise in programming. Much of this is leveraged during the aforementioned automation tasks, which require code. DevOps engineers are often proficient in languages such as Python for this purpose. They also need robust familiarity with software engineering principles, so they can remediate problems during testing and deployment.
Soft skills
While DevOps engineers possess substantial technical expertise, their soft skills are equally well-rounded. Since they function as a liaison between two teams with juxtaposed objectives, they need leadership qualities and great communication skills to get their job done.
Astute problem-solving abilities also serve them well on the soft side of things. Since they often need to make tradeoffs between two conflicting business objectives, the ability to find well-balanced solutions is indispensable. This also translates into a high degree of flexibility and adaptability, especially in the ever-shifting realm of continuous development.
DevOps engineers are essential for planning strategies to reach business goals and capable of careful cost and benefit analysis on the technology and operational front. They can also conduct risk assessments, gauge and set operational forecasts and manage deployment timelines. Finally, they consult on leadership decisions from a workflow management perspective and then develop a plan for carrying out those goals across departments.
Education and training
In most colleges and universities, degree programs focus on the wider discipline of computer science. While this can certainly lead to a path of DevOps engineering, programs that teach the necessary skills often sit at two ends of a spectrum. In most cases, DevOps engineers are professionals who have spent years working in one area while amassing the necessary knowledge in the other.
Industry certifications, such as those for Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s cloud solutions, are highly regarded by businesses. These certifications all require extensive knowledge and experience to obtain.
Becoming a DevOps engineer requires deep technical knowledge across two domains and soft skills that are no less impressive. As technology professionals, they need to keep their skills sharp by following industry tools, techniques and trends. In other words, their robust skillsets are continuously developing.