Updated May 29, 2023
Introduction to DevOps Engineer
DevOps Engineer is the role that helps the organization for faster and more reliable software delivery life cycle management. The DevOps professionals work with the development team, testing team, and IT infrastructure team or Cloud Administrators to collaborate on the tasks and processes. DevOps engineers possess skills in several tools and technologies used for source code management, build automation, and deployment automation.
Apart from the standard tools, DevOps Engineers generally work with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and IBM Cloud. DevOps engineers manage specific tasks such as infrastructure provisioning and job scheduling using Python scripting or similar programming languages.
Why do we Need a DevOps Engineer?
- We need a DevOps engineer or DevOps to achieve things in less time than traditional processes and in an efficient way. We need a DevOps engineer to unify stuff among all the teams. For example, if the development team is working on a Windows environment to develop modules, and the testing team is using Linux or Mac, the production environment is something else like Ubuntu. We may encounter various issues after deploying the product since development is typically done in one environment, but testing is performed in different environments.
- To solve these kinds of problems, DevOps engineers and tools are required to overcome the situation, and code will work in any environment. We need a DevOps engineer to achieve software development in less time with more productivity; releases can happen frequently, work can be divided into small tasks and assigned to good teams, we can roll back to the previous versions easily, and it will reduce the cost to the company.
Roles and Responsibilities of DevOps Engineer
The roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer include but are not limited to,
- Design, build, test, deploy and maintain CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Dockers and integration tools like Git, Maven, and others.
- Need to know different tools and processes and what to choose for the business needs etc.
- DevOps engineers must be able to automate the testing, deployment tools, and infrastructure code, populate the results, and display them on the dashboard.
- DevOps engineers must collaborate among the development, systems team, testing, and infrastructure team and deliver the applications/products to the customer within a stipulated time and frequently.
- DevOps engineer needs to know about the development team’s different tools and how to integrate with components like libraries, databases, and mailing systems to communicate and release the software.
- DevOps engineers must update themselves with the latest technology and tools used in the industry.
- They need to think out of the box and implement solutions, and be able to handle critical situations.
- They need to scale systems and infrastructure to ensure the system’s availability and services to the developers and testers.
- They need to be an effective communicator to communicate effectively among the teams.
Skills Required for DevOps Engineer
Given below are the skills required for a DevOps engineer:
1. They need deployment skills in a different environment to deploy the machines and other automation tools like Chef, puppet, and Ansible to automate the deployment—virtualization skills to deploy virtual machines in a private cloud, public cloud domains, etc.
2. They need work experience in cloud technologies like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and cluster technology like Kubernetes to deploy and maintain the dockets on the fly.
3. Able to design architecture in such a way that it can scale the infrastructure based on customer requirements.
4. They need programming and scripting experience in different programming languages like Python, JavaScript, Perl, etc., and how to use web APIs and restful services.
5. DevOps engineers should possess the skills to integrate various software tools, CI/CD tools, and deployment tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet, Git, etc., and automate the entire integration and deployment process to eliminate the need for manual intervention in the future.
6. They need to think like a customer and have better communication skills to communicate and collaborate with other teams in the organization efficiently.
7. They need to know different tools for different purposes,
- Source Control (Source Code Repository Control): Git, BitBucket, SVN, Mercurial.
- Cloud Technologies: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment: Jenkins, Bamboo, etc.
- Infrastructure Automation Tools: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc., to automate environment creation and required package installation using the templates.
- Deployment: For deployment effectively, we need to know containerization using Kubernetes to manage the clusters (a group of Docker images).
8. DevOps engineers need to know about networking and security to ensure that everything is streamlined and does not affect daily business activities. This will enable the proper firewalls so that only desired traffic can come and access the services and applications.
9. They need excellent debugging and verification skills to debug the issues and provide a fix ASAP so that production or daily regression won’t affect the day-to-day business activities.
10. They need experience in monitoring tools like Nagios, which will monitor the dashboard continuously.
11. They need to have working experience with web APIs so that we can automate deployment in cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Career Path for DevOps Engineers
- There are many job opportunities or job roles for DevOps engineers who are emerging daily. Some jobs include DevOps Architect, Software Test Engineer, System Engineer, Automation Engineer, cloud engineer, security engineer, Integration Engineer, AWS web services engineer, and release engineering manager.
- There is a lot of demand for DevOps engineers and an increase in the number of Job openings year by year, with an average salary of 750k for 3-5 years of experience and 1m-2m for 5-10 years of experienced employees. So, there are many opportunities for a DevOps engineer to go through in the Industry.
Conclusion
Finally, it’s all about DevOps engineers. We have discussed who a DevOps engineer is, why we need a DevOps engineer, the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer, the skills required, a career path in DevOps, etc. A DevOps engineer’s role is not confined to specific tasks or responsibilities, as they must handle multiple tasks in different domains that demand a diverse range of skills.
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