The responsibilities of a DevOps engineer include introducing processes, methods, and technologies to make the product development cycle (coding, deployment, maintenance, and updating) as smooth as possible. The IT team and the developer team in a company can have a different set of skills, making it hard to establish coordination. This is where DevOps engineers come in. Whenever an organization wants to add a new feature to its product, DevOps engineering takes care of all the processes involved in it.
The core responsibility of a DevOps engineer is to automate the process of upgrading the features of a product and provide stability to the application once it is released. They bridge the gap between developers, managers, and testers.
What are the skills needed to become a DevOps Engineer?
Communication skills –It is clear that a person who bridges the gap between different teams in an organization needs to have excellent communication skills. Along with great communication skills, you also need collaboration skills to communicate efficiently with the developer team and the operations team. To maintain functionality between different, you must have communication and collaboration skills together.
Other soft skills – A DevOps engineer needs to be logical, analytical, motivated, and flexible to be able to handle all the tasks. They should be avid learners, always ready to learn and adapt to new technologies.
Knowledge of tools – Being a DevOps engineer, you will be entirely dependent upon software/tools involved in various phases of implementation of a feature. There are so many tools out there, but only some of them play a significant role in the tasks of a DevOps engineer.
Coding – Any job that requires development work needs a person who is an expert in coding. Some of the recommended languages for DevOps engineers are Python, Java, R, JavaScript, PHP, Node.js, etc.
Automation – You need a good command of automation tools to become a DevOps engineer. They should be able to automate the whole pipeline, app performance, configurations, etc.
Testing – Testing skills are crucial to excel as a DevOps engineer. They must run tests on the new features to make sure the new functions don’t fail. Automation helps a lot in the execution of these tests.
Right Skill = Bright Future
Security – With quick development, comes a lot of security risks. To manage these risks, a DevOps engineer should be able to maintain security during the whole process. DevSecOps is a skill that refers to DevOps engineers who are familiar with implementing security tools in the process. It can be an added bonus to boost your profile.
How to become a DevOps engineer?
You need to follow a step by step preparation strategy to get a job as a DevOps engineer. Start with the foundation, that is, learning Linux or Python, followed by Cloud computing. When you build a strong foundation for yourself, it becomes easy to acquire expert-level skills.
There are some skills that are a must for every budding DevOps engineer. There might be a lot of things to learn, but don’t be overwhelmed, you don’t need to learn them all at once.
The foundation layers Linux and Python take years to master in themselves, so you will never really stop learning them even if you become a DevOps engineer. The second step/layer – Cloud computing is an ever-evolving technology and requires you to keep up to date with new technologies.
After you are confident that you’ve acquired the foundation layer technologies enough, move to gain real-life skills – Terraform, Git, GitHub, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Prometheus, etc. Don’t just stop after learning these tools, keep expanding your knowledge to stay relevant.
One thing you should be aware of is that if a company is hiring for a “DevOps Department” or “DevOps team” it might be a trap. The whole purpose of hiring a DevOps engineer is to bridge the gap between different teams, not create more.
