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

Propel your career to unprecedented heights with Udacity’s online development and engineering certifications. Without a clear path of advancement to the position, IT departments must identify the right combination of DevOps engineer skills in hires or experienced employees. DevOps engineering requires a mix of technical and people skills (also known as soft skills) to succeed. Equipping DevOps Engineers with the technical prowess for robust IaC, seamless CI/CD, cloud mastery, and efficient system monitoring to drive operational excellence. DevOps engineers can stay updated on emerging technologies, best practices, and industry trends through training programs, workshops, conferences, and online courses.

Day by day, the responsibility is increasing with more formal security tasks such as managing antimalware and intrusion protection platforms. Therefore, while writing low-level code is usually left to the development teams, the DevOps engineers need to gain knowledge and understand the source code. Some of the things a DevOps engineer performs are developing scripts and tackling integration, such as getting the code version to talk to the MySQL database to run the deployments on the operations side. The DevOps engineer needs to have knowledge of some programming languages, such as C++, Python, Ruby, PHP, and many more. While DevOps is not a specific job title or role, organizations often hire for a “DevOps Engineer” role.

Continuous Delivery

This know-how usually extends to creating and maintaining reliable and highly available services, such as resilient cloud infrastructures. It takes sound collaboration and version management skills to assess ever-changing user requirements; assemble the correct components; and craft a software release that runs properly on the desired infrastructure, whether local or cloud. Specific education is sometimes required in DevOps engineer job postings, but it’s practical knowledge and hands-on experience that is always key. You can gain in-demand DevOps skills from an industry leader in technology with IBM’s Introduction to DevOps. In this beginner-friendly online course, you’ll learn about essential DevOps concepts like CI/CD, automation, and test driven development (TDD). A DevOps engineer is responsible for optimizing an organization’s software, including software maintenance and server administration.

• 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.
• This increases the ability to ship software applications more rapidly, with fast-paced improvements and evolutions in comparison to traditional software development approaches.
• Development skills include understanding project requirements; writing, reviewing and validating code; fixing bugs; managing CI/CD tools and pipelines; performing root cause analysis, troubleshooting and incident management.
• Leadership roles offer opportunities to mentor junior team members, influence organizational transformation, and drive innovation at scale.

Bash is crucial for a DevOps Engineer because it enables the automation and scripting of complex operations across various environments, enhancing efficiency and consistency in the deployment, management, and scaling of software systems. Testing, security, and monitoring are vital for maintaining the integrity and performance of applications and infrastructure. DevOps engineers should have expertise in implementing automated testing, security best practices, and robust monitoring solutions (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) to detect and address issues proactively. Performance management may also extend to issue tracking and help desk support to prioritize tickets and investigate complex problems. With the growth in big data analytics and AI, performance management might increasingly employ analytics and AI tools to identify complex application problems, perform predictive analytics and look for future trends in application behavior. DevOps teams may opt to work with data science and analytical teams to support such efforts rather than attempt to master those additional big data skills as a DevOps function.

Software Security

CI tools automate the process of integrating code changes from multiple developers into a shared repository, enabling teams to detect and address integration issues early in the development cycle. These platforms facilitate automated builds, testing, and code analysis, helping teams deliver high-quality software with greater speed and efficiency. DevOps engineers must collaborate with various teams, including developers, quality assurance, and IT operations, to ensure seamless software development and delivery. Effective collaboration leads to better integration, fewer bottlenecks, and faster deployments. Development skills include understanding project requirements; writing, reviewing and validating code; fixing bugs; managing CI/CD tools and pipelines; performing root cause analysis, troubleshooting and incident management. Infrastructure skills include implementing tools and infrastructure; building automated processes; and developing security measures through vulnerability assessment and risk management practices.

DevOps engineer skills should include knowledge of PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and other programming languages such as Java and C++. DevOps engineers also benefit from a background in continuous integration management tools such as Jenkins, Apache Maven and Apache Ant. In the IT landscape, a DevOps engineer assumes multiple roles, requiring proficiency in both the development and operations aspects of software. This entails knowledge of coding languages, adept management of servers and networks, system setup, configuration, and the utilization of specialized DevOps tools for task automation. Effective communication and teamwork skills are paramount as DevOps engineers act as bridges between different teams, fostering collaboration and streamlining the software development process.

Importance of DevOps Engineers

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. DevOps engineers work in multidisciplinary teams, interacting with developers, IT operations staff, quality assurance professionals, and other stakeholders.

DevOps engineers are usually well-versed in one or more programming languages (like Java, PHP, or C++) for coding and scripting. DevOps Engineers are IT professionals who work with production IT staff, including software developers and system operators in various companies. Typically, the development, testing, and support departments were used to working in silos, creating process gaps and conflict in duties as different people managed these functions. Such barriers were the significant causes of misunderstandings, miscommunications, and conflict in prioritization and were proven detrimental to productivity, resulting in customer dissatisfaction. DevOps’ evolution as an approach and a DevOps engineer job profile has tried to close these gaps to a great extent. Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability, widely used in DevOps practices to collect and process metrics from software applications and infrastructure.

Knowledge of Tools

These are the people who have been historically described as “computer programmers” before the rise of agile thinking. For example, one of the most valuable returns on a DevOps investment is the ability to deliver faster feedback to developers. A DevOps engineer will often have to work with QA (whether they be manual testers or developers who write test automation) to improve the speed, efficacy, and output of testing methodologies.

At the end of the program, you’ll combine your new skills by completing a capstone project. DevOps engineers may begin their careers as a product developer, software developer or software engineer devops engineer training 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 Engineer Skills

Containers encapsulate software dependencies and runtime environments, enabling applications to run consistently across different infrastructure environments. Kubernetes, in particular, simplifies container orchestration, scaling, and service discovery, empowering DevOps teams to build and manage resilient, scalable, and portable containerized applications. When we begin discussing the DevOps engineer job description, we may begin by saying that the role of a DevOps engineer is critical to the project’s overall success, right from planning to support primary KPI as customer satisfaction and productivity. A DevOps Engineer Expert has an essential role in integrating the project functions and resources across the product life cycle, right from planning, building, testing, and deployment to support.

Entrepreneurial opportunities abound in areas such as DevOps consulting, cloud migration services, DevOps tool development, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions catering to DevOps needs. Launching a startup allows DevOps engineers to pursue their creative vision, solve complex problems, and make a significant impact on the industry. By focusing on these areas and leveraging the resources provided, you can significantly improve your Bash scripting skills, making you a more effective DevOps Engineer. Docker is a platform for developing, shipping, and running applications inside lightweight, portable containers, enabling consistent environments and streamlining deployment and scaling across various environments in a DevOps workflow.

In this course, you will earn an employer-recognized certificate while learning demonstrable skills for employers, including building applications and using automation tools. DevOps teams using third-party code during software development can potentially leave the program susceptible to security concerns. In order to combat this, you should have security skills, including threat investigation, code analysis, and vulnerability assessments. 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. Knowledge of tools in DevOps has significant importance since tools let you accomplish desired tasks with ease.