5 Skills You Need To Be a DevOps Engineer
The essential skills you’ll need to have a lucrative career in this domain
As the demand for rapid and efficient delivery of software increases, the need for DevOps engineers continues to grow, making it one of the most sought-after technology positions on the market today.
In order to be a successful DevOps engineer and flourish in an incredibly competitive world, you’re going to need some special skills.
Here are the top five skills that are essential for a career in this field.
1. Automation
Automation is the heart of DevOps.
“Wait, so you do that task manually every day and it takes you an hour each time?” is the type of question you will be asking people a lot as a DevOps engineer.
Almost all development and release tasks that are performed manually should be automated by a DevOps engineer. It is hugely important that a software development lifecycle has as few manual steps as possible. If you want to make releasing software efficient and consistent (who doesn’t?), then automation is the answer.
So, what does a DevOps engineer automate?
An engineer will automate all aspects of the development and release process. In order to call yourself a DevOps engineer, you’ll need to be able to create a fully automated end-to-end pipeline that starts by building code from a repository and ends with releasing software out to production. This pipeline will typically include infrastructure creation, configuration management, and security automation too.
How is this possible?
By leveraging the wide range of available DevOps tooling and also by being able to write the odd script or two. It’s important to know that you don’t need to be able to work with every single DevOps technology (there are lots!) and you don’t need to be a coding guru by any means.
So you don’t need to know all of the DevOps tools, but you will typically need to be competent with at least one tool from each of the following groups:
- Continuous Deployment tools such as Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Spinnaker, and Travis.
- Configuration Management tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.
- Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform and Pulumi.
In terms of scripting, having a good grasp of languages like Ruby, Python, and Shell will certainly be handy for automation.
2. Communication and Collaboration
In order to understand why communication and collaboration are important for the role, you need to understand why the practices of DevOps were formed.
One of the main drivers behind DevOps was the conflicting outlooks from development and operations teams in regards to releases.
On one hand, you had developers who wanted to release as many features as possible. “The customers are demanding this functionality. We need to release” was their view.
On the other hand, you had operations who wanted to release software less often. Their outlook would be “Each release is a change and a change is a risk.”
The DevOps solution to this problem is that one group of people is responsible for ensuring software is created, tested, and deployed in a safe, reliable, and efficient manner. That group is DevOps engineers.
So, what does this have to do with communication or collaboration?
DevOps is all about breaking down the aforementioned silos between teams, meaning that a DevOps engineer needs to be able to build up connections with people and bring them together from teams across the organization. With that unity, all teams work together towards the common goal of delivering high-quality software to customers.
Additionally, in order to implement a DevOps culture at an organization, you will need to educate others on the DevOps principles and tooling. This won’t be possible without strong communication and collaboration skills.
3. Cloud
When it comes to infrastructure, many companies choose cloud computing to house their IT services and applications as opposed to the traditional on-site options.
90% of companies use some type of cloud service.
With the services that are offered by cloud providers, DevOps engineers are able to manage infrastructure seamlessly, as the cloud enables organizations to create scalable, flexible, and secure applications.
There are many different cloud providers that all offer their own unique set of services — the most common of them being AWS, Azure, and Google.
The fundamental types of services in the cloud that you’ll need a great understanding of are:
- Networking
- Virtualization (VM/Container/Serverless)
- Security
- Storage
- Monitoring
If you are lucky enough to be working at a company who host their infrastructure application in the cloud, then you’ll need to be comfortable designing and developing cloud architecture. For example, knowing when it is better to use an IaaS offering or a PaaS offering.
4. Security
The high rate of software releases that DevOps enables can be dangerous if security is an afterthought. A DevOps engineer must ensure that security is kept in mind during all parts of the software development lifecycle.
Adding a new app feature? Let’s make sure we run vulnerability scans against it before it goes anywhere near production.
Adding a new cloud service? Let’s make sure it’s only accessible by the resources we want to have access to it.
DevOps engineers change the mindset of security being a post-deployment process by implementing it before any code and infrastructure changes take place. This is often referred to as DevSecOps.
5. Operational Support
Good DevOps engineers don’t just work on the development side of things. DevOps is all-encompassing, so you ought to have a solid technical understanding of IT operations.
A DevOps engineer should ensure that all systems have monitoring and alerting in place to assist the availability and uptime of production services. There are a number of tools out there that you can use for this — Prometheus and Grafana being two examples of them.
In the event of an issue, it is important to have the skillset to troubleshoot technical faults on the respective operating system. Knowing your way around a Linux and Windows server is super important.
In the event of a full loss of service, it is common for a DevOps engineer to initiate a disaster recovery process to regain service. Ideally, the DR process will be automated!
Conclusion
Developing these skills is essential to succeed as a DevOps engineer. A DevOps engineer is a great team player who prioritizes customer satisfaction. You’ll need to be able to react well to change, be technically strong, and have a good understanding of DevOps tooling.
