Who is a DevOps Engineer?
Who is a DevOps engineer? A software engineer who converted as a system engineer or a system engineer who moved to development and become a software engineer? The answer is yes or no in respective scenarios. But, The DevOps engineer is an Information technology professional who works with software developers, testing teams, and the IT infrastructure team in a company to overcome the gap between these teams and release the product or features in a timely manner. He will have a better understanding of the entire software development life cycle and good at handling the crunch situations during peak time or releases using his soft and technical skills.
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 the things among all the teams. For example, the development team is working on a windows environment to develop modules and testing team is using Linux or Mac environment but the production environment is something else like Ubuntu then we might see so many issues after deploying the product as development is being done in one environment but testing is being done in other environments. In order to solve these kinds of problems DevOps engineer and tools are required to overcome the situation and code will work in any environment. We need DevOps engineer to achieve software development in less time with more productivity; releases can happen very frequently, work can be divided into small tasks and assign to proper 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 DevOps engineer includes but not limited to,
- Design, build, test, deployment and maintains CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Dockers, integration tools like Git, Maven and other tools.
- 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, infrastructure code, populate the results and display on the dashboard.
- DevOps engineer needs to collaborate among teams like development, systems team, and testing and infrastructure team and deliver the applications/products to the customer in a stipulated time and frequently.
- DevOps engineer needs to know about different tools used by the development team and how to integrate with components like libraries, databases, mailing systems to communicate and release the software.
- They need to be updated with the latest technology and tools being used in the industry.
- They need to think out of the box and implement solutions and able to handle critical situations.
- They need to scale systems and infrastructure, need to ensure the availability of the system and services to the developers and testers.
- They need to be an effective communicator in order to communicate effectively among the teams.
Skills Required for DevOps Engineer?
1. They need to have deployment skills in a different environment to deploy the machines and different automation tools like chef, puppet, and Ansible to automate the deployment. Virtualization skills to deploy virtual machines in private cloud, public cloud domains, etc.
2. They need to have 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 the customer requirement.
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4. They need to have programming and scripting experience in different programming languages like python, JavaScript, Perl, etc. and how to use web APIs and use restful services.
5. Need to have skills to integrate different software tools, CI/CD tools, and deployment tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet, Git, etc. and automate the entire integration and deployment process so that no manual intervention is needed in future.
6. They need to think like a customer and better communication skills so that they can easily communicate and collaborate with other teams in the organization.
7. They need to know different tools for different purposes like for,
- 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, required packages 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. They need to have knowledge of networking and security to make sure everything is streamlined and doesn’t affect the daily business activities. This will enable the proper firewalls so that only desired traffic only can come and access the services and applications.
9. They need to have excellent debugging and verification skills so that he can able to debug the issues and able to provide a fix ASAP so that production or daily regression won’t affect the daily business activities.
10. They need to have experience in monitoring tools like Nagios which will monitor continuously the dashboard.
11. They need to have working experience with web API’s 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 which are emerging daily. Some of the jobs like 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 with 3-5 years’ experience and 1m-2m for 5-10 years’ experience 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 is a DevOps engineer, why do we need DevOps engineer, what are the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer, what are the skills required, a career path in DevOps, etc. So, we can say that DevOps engineer is not confined to a particular role as he needs to handle multiple tasks in different domains with variant skills. I hope you will have a better understanding of DevOps engineer after reading this article.
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