What it Takes to be a DevOps Engineer
The software development life cycle (SDLC) involves many steps and a lot of time is involved in creating and putting together the product. DevOps is a practice that aims to minimize the time taken for the software development life cycle to be complete.
DevOps is a collaboration between the development and the operations team, which enables a continuous delivery of applications and services. Many organizations are now moving to DevOps, thus making DevOps engineering jobs higher in demand. DevOps is a field that is growing and that will continue to grow. <!--more-->
Introduction
The development team creates the product, while the operations team manages and maintains this product. DevOps focuses on the continuous delivery of applications when the development team is ready with the product it immediately goes into the maintenance and management phase.
This article aims to help those interested in DevOps engineering careers. It gives a complete roadmap and sets a path of what it takes to be a successful DevOps engineer.
Who is a DevOps Engineer?
A DevOps engineer is an IT person who understands the software development lifecycle and has a deep understanding of the various automation tools for developing digital pipelines (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, CI/CD pipelines). DevOps engineers needs to understand the whole purpose of the SDLC because it has moved from the waterfall model to the agile model and finally to the DevOps lifecycle. They need to know the shortcomings of the previous models. While also, knowing how to use the automation tools needed for developing continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines.
A DevOps engineer understands all CI/CD pipelines phases from planning to the monitoring of the product. At the planning phase, an algorithm of the product being created is written. The second stage is building the product, where the algorithm is transformed into code and to a usable product.
The DevOps engineer tests the product to catch any of the bugs and errors. After testing, the product is sent to the deployment stage, and once deployed, continuous monitoring of the product is necessary.
A DevOps engineer collaborates with the other developers on the team and the operations team to deliver high-quality products within a minimum amount of time.
With the use of DevOps, there is good throughput, continuous system improvements, faster feedback, and the product is released within a shorter amount of time and there are fewer risks involved.
Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer
The DevOps field is evolving very fast and to follow the career path here are the roles and responsibilities along with the description.
- DevOps Architect
The principal officer responsible for analyzing and executing the DevOps practices within the organization.
- Integration Specialist
Responsible for integration and code continuity. An integration specialist supports engineering and testing the team to meet infrastructure needs and developed automation.
- Release Manager
He/she is responsible for releasing a product faster, releasing new product features, and ensuring stability. He/she effectively uses the CI/CD pipeline by planning, scheduling, building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and controlling the software development process.
- Automation Engineer
He/she is responsible for achieving automation on applications and building them using DevOps tools such as Git, Jenkins, Kubernetes, etc. The automation engineer uses configuration management tools such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc. to automate configuration across the infrastructure.
- Quality Assurance
This role is responsible for testing the quality of the products, which have been developed and confirms their requirements.
- Software Tester
A test engineer is responsible for developing code and testing it. He verifies that changes made on code work well and as intended to make sure any changes made do not crush or break the final product.
- Security Engineer
Security is very important for any product being developed, for DevOps emphasizes on continuous security. A security engineer is responsible for monitoring the products.
DevOps Tools
It is a source code management tool that enables code and files to be well organized and be easily accessible. Git manages huge projects, track changes, and allows multiple developers to work together.
Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tool, it helps to automate continuous development, testing, and deployment of newly created code.
Selenium is a testing tool, which provides fast execution, allows scripting in several programming languages, and supports parallel test execution.
Docker helps with containerization. It enables high scalability and efficiency, reusable data volumes, and isolated applications.
Ansible is a configuration management tool and uses SSH for secure connections
Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool.
Puppet is a configuration management tool.
Chef is also a configuration management tool.
Nagios is a monitoring tool. It has a comprehensive monitoring system, which enables continuous monitoring
DevOps Engineer Skills
- Programming Language Knowledge
There are programming languages that go hand in hand with DevOps tools. The programming languages such as Python, Ruby, and Java Script develop and automates the software.
- Linux Fundamentals
A DevOps engineer should know the Linux Fundamentals such as Linux shell, Linux commands, and networking commands.
- Knowledge of DevOps tools
Configuration tools like – Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc. Source code management tools like Git and GitHub and monitoring tools such as Nagios.
Conclusion
In this article we've discussed in detail what it takes to be a successful DevOps engineer. A DevOps engineer should know about cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google cloud. AWS is the most popular Cloud provider, it provides high scalability and flexibility, it is cost-effective and provides better security. A DevOps Engineer should have experience in developing continuous integration and continuous integration pipelines (CI/CD pipelines).
