IT Career Skills Series: DevOps Engineer

In the digital age, required skill sets are constantly changing. You may be looking to upskill your current team or hire new talent to fill those skill gaps. Or maybe you’re looking to elevate your own skills and career. Whatever your goals, welcome to the IT Career Skills Series. In this 10 part series, we will breakdown the top skills for each role your need on your IT dream team.

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DevOps Engineers are a hot commodity these days. Companies are rapidly adopting DevOps due to its benefits in speed, quality, and performance. And they need experts to lead the way. The DevOps Engineer role is one of the highest paying jobs in the world earning an average salary of over $121,000.

Are you looking to adopt or improve your DevOps practice? Does your team have proficiency in the right skills to make your investment worthwhile? Or are you looking to recruit a DevOps Engineer? If you answered yes to any of these, keep reading to learn the skills and capabilities you need to fill the DevOps Engineer role.

What Does is a DevOps Engineer?

“DevOps Engineer works with developers and the IT staff to oversee the code releases. They are either developers who get interested in deployment and network operations or sysadmins who have a passion for scripting and coding and move into the development side where they can improve the planning of test and deployment.”

1 | Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

CI/CD are foundational concepts of DevOps. Continuous integration is the practice of merging code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. Continuous Delivery is the practice where code changes are automatically prepared for a release to production. It’s required that a DevOps Engineer has a proficient understanding of each concept in order to apply the right tools, systems, and roles to an organization's unique DeVOps environment.

2 | Programming and Scripting

DevOps Engineers should have knowledge of at least one scripting language. Before you can deploy your applications and set up automation, you need infrastructure for your environments. In order to build infrastructure, you must be proficient in a scripting language. The top scripting languages for DevOps include Go, Python, Scala, Ruby, C, and more.

3 | Automation Tools

Automation is a key part of what makes DevOps an effective development and deployment approach. There are several traditionally manual tasks and processes in the Devops that can be automated through 3rd-party tools or scripting languages. A Devops engineer should have the capability to implement automation at any stage from requirements through deployment.

4 | Testing

While automation may increase speed, it also increases the risk for oversight and mistakes. Therefore testing is a key practice in DevOps. Automated testing allows development teams to release new code quickly while still meeting high-performance standards. DevOps Engineers should be able to confidently implement testing at any stage of the development process. He or she should also be familiar with DevOps testing tools such as Puppet, Docker, Jenkins, and more.

5 | Cloud Deployment

A key part of the DevOps Engineering role is the ability to use automation tools to create pipelines that streamline the development and delivery of code. The cloud offers “automated provisioning and scaling to accommodate application changes.” DevOps Engineers should have proficiency in at least one cloud service platform such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.

6 | Security

DevOps functions in a highly-integrated, cloud environment. While this means development and deployment are streamlined, this type of environment can expose new vulnerabilities that can affect the product’s code faster than before. It’s important that DevOps Engineers have security training and can write secure code to protect applications from attack from the start, not addressing the problem in final stages before deployment, after it’s already evolved.

7 | Collaboration

DevOps is built around the fundamental concept that Developers and Operations work as a single unit to reduce time and improve quality of software. Therefore, cross-functional collaboration is a must-have soft skill for DevOps Engineers. Not only do DevOps Engineers need to unify and optimize systems, they need to be able to do the same with people.

8 | Clear Communication

Like any position in business, clear communication is key to a productive workforce and high quality outcomes. DevOps Engineers must be able to communicate effectively with many different type roles across the organization. He or she is responsible for ensuring everyone is on the same page when it comes to the systems, tools, and responsibilities of those involved in the DevOps process.

9 | Problem Solving

DevOps thrives continuous improvement. The process is designed to get products to market fast, not perfect. Bugs, updates, and new versions of the product will require a DevOps engineer to think critically and proactively about how to improve the product. Additionally, the DevOps process is not a cookie-cutter. While some elements will remain consistent, each organization will have a unique DevOps practice. A good DevOps Engineer should be able to apply best practices and tools to create an optimal DevOps approach for their organization.

10 | Flexible or Agile Mindset

DevOps calls for continuous improvement, not perfection. Working on several critical tasks for various teams, a DevOps engineer needs to be agile and learn to adapt to changing requests and results. Just as the integrated and automated systems are designed for team members to adapt their code more efficiently, a DevOps engineer must adapt systems to optimize the performance of people, systems, and tools.