What Exactly Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
A good DevOps engineer is gold in the making.
When you invest in a great DevOps engineer – or teams of DevOps engineers, depending on the size of your organization and the complexity of your project – you will discover that:
The diverse strands of your development and IT departments collaborate more effectively.
You will be able to release changes to your product more quickly.
You can automate a portion of your internal procedures, freeing up hours that could be spent on other duties.
But, in the end, what exactly is a DevOps engineer, and what do they accomplish on a daily basis that makes them so valuable?
To answer this topic, we’ll first look at what the term “DevOps” means before moving on to DevOps engineer roles, duties, and essential qualities. We’ll also go through the tools they’ll require and how they can integrate into a larger development team.
What exactly is DevOps?
DevOps is a concept that combines the words “development” with “operations” to form a more-or-less self-explanatory phrase.
DevOps is a development strategy that connects software development with IT operations. It tries to foster an agile interaction between the two, allowing firms to build and deploy regular updates to their products much more quickly than the more traditional ‘waterfall’ development paradigm.
As a result, DevOps engineers (and DevOps teams) sit between development and deployment, ensuring that everything is set up to release changes as quickly as feasible. Finally, it comes down to collaboration and removing impediments to it.
The significance of CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) are two basic DevOps ideas that distinguish DevOps deployment from more traditional approaches. Unlike traditional development approaches, which function on a linear timeline with one step following the other, firms that use DevOps can run these stages continuously in a sort of infinite feedback loop.
The advantages are substantial — if done correctly, you may deploy numerous times per day utilizing a DevOps technique without requiring your users to download anything or take any more action. They may not even realize anything has changed.
This type of development is quickly becoming a necessity rather than a luxury in today’s fast-paced environment. If you haven’t already made the transition, it’s really worth considering.
What exactly is a DevOps engineer?
The term ‘DevOps engineer’ is frequently used to refer to any DevOps practitioner, whether or not they are an engineer in the traditional sense.
A DevOps engineer is an IT professional who works with software developers, system operators and administrators, IT operations employees, and others to oversee and/or support code releases or deployments on a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) basis.
How do DevOps engineers accomplish this?
DevOps engineers take on a variety of day-to-day responsibilities to accomplish this. These are some examples:
Project management:
In some circumstances, DevOps engineers take the lead in managing the whens, wheres, hows, and whos of an IT project, ensuring that everyone is on the same page, aware of critical deadlines, and in constant communication.
Designing and improving IT infrastructure:
Your core infrastructure may be holding you back. A DevOps engineer can help you figure out how to enhance this in order to foster collaboration and, ultimately, get your releases to market faster.
Performance testing and benchmarking:
Analyzing how well and consistently systems run is an important component of a DevOps engineer’s daily tasks.
Automation:
Are important but repetitive tasks slowing down your releases? One of the primary responsibilities of a DevOps engineer is to reduce the number of hours spent on these tasks by automating them and developing valuable software plugins that will lighten the load on your software team.
Optimizing release cycles:
Are you wasting time because of the way your release cycles are set up? DevOps engineers seek for ways to optimize your release cycles, eliminate hidden time drains, and propose innovative approaches to speed up the process (new software, for example).
Monitoring and reporting:
One of a DevOp engineer’s responsibilities is to offer input from production in order to reduce the ‘time to detect’ (TTD) and ‘time to minimize’ (TTM) of problems.
SecDevOps, or security-focused DevOps, is a set of best practices aimed at keeping security at the forefront of all DevOps operations. This comprises essential process automation, release scheduling, and infrastructure design.
What qualities does a good DevOps engineer possess?
DevOps is, in many ways, the glue that holds your multiple IT activities together. Keeping this in mind, it’s as crucial to emphasize the soft talents that a DevOps engineer brings to the table in addition to their technical understanding.
Your DevOps engineer will be organizing meetings, making release schedules, and leading the review process, as well as working with automation, complex software tools, and infrastructure architecture – therefore search for someone who is an excellent organizer with great interpersonal skills. Unsympathetic, unapproachable DevOps engineers, no matter how good they are technical, struggle with the ‘getting everyone talking to each other more’ component of the job.
Background-wise, good DevOps engineers can be found in many areas of IT. You could, of course, look for someone who has only ever been a DevOps engineer – however, because the field is still relatively new (12-ish years old), this may limit your options.
Former software engineers and IT operations workers (for example, sysadmins) can both make excellent DevOps engineers, with their previous expertise in the IT function giving real-world information that can inform their collaboration between the two.
Is it necessary for DevOps engineers to be able to code?
DevOps engineers would not generally work directly on your product code (that is the responsibility of your software developers!).
What they frequently need to do is offer solutions that save the time (and, in some cases, the sanity) of your development and operations teams. This could include developing code or scripts to automate critical operations, or creating plugins to improve the way your development and deployment tools suit the needs of your team.
This may not necessitate full-fledged coding, but a decent understanding of mid-level scripting is frequently quite useful.
What other qualities should a good DevOps engineer possess?
You should also look for:
Working knowledge of agile approach. DevOps is, in part, agile implemented outside of the software development team, thus having individuals who know what’s what here is really beneficial.
Knowledge of common tools – see the list below for additional information.
Software evaluation. Much of this can now be automated, but it’s still useful to be able to run human tests when necessary.
What are the tools that a DevOps engineer employs?
As the phrase goes, a good worker is nothing without their tools.
DevOps engineers rely on a variety of software packages to conduct their job effectively on a daily basis. If you’re thinking about employing a DevOps engineer or a DevOps team, it’s critical to incorporate this cost into your budget.
The tools listed below are industry standards from well-known manufacturers. There are good alternatives, however, if you’re searching for DevOps experts with direct experience with specific software packages, they’re a great place to start:
Automation solutions (such as Jenkins and Bamboo) enable your DevOps engineers to personalize and automate your delivery pipeline.
Source code management (e.g., Git):
Source code management solutions allow you to track the progress of any development work, view version histories, and create version ‘branches,’ which can subsequently be merged as needed once you’ve agreed on the final product’s appearance.
Repository hosting (e.g., Github, Bitbucket):
You’ll need a code repository to integrate source code management tools into your DevOps procedures. Github and Bitbucket are the two most well-known Git repositories; if you’re using a different SCM technology, you’ll need to go elsewhere.
Containerization software (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes):
Containerization entails placing a program and all of its accompanying configuration files and libraries in a container within its own operating system, allowing it to run across several physical computers regardless of dependencies). This is a key element of a DevOps engineer’s day-to-day tasks, therefore investing in a reliable solution is critical.
Configuration management technologies (e.g., Puppet Enterprise, Ansible, Chef) enable your DevOps engineers to configure and manage your infrastructure – sometimes as code – and automate deployment.
Monitoring software (e.g., Nagios, Raygun):
Monitoring software assists your DevOps team in monitoring your infrastructure for any issues and resolving them quickly and satisfactorily.
Project management tools (e.g., Jira, Trello):
These aren’t exclusive to DevOps, but they’re worth mentioning because of how much easier they make completing tasks. DevOps engineers can use these to monitor the progress of their team, keep everyone on track to meet deadlines, and identify any pain points where process improvements could be made.
What constitutes a good DevOps team?
If your company is large enough (and busy enough) to justify a team of DevOps engineers, you may want to look for people who have a special interest in some of the topics described above rather than employing a team of generalists.
Positions to look for include:
A release manager is in charge of the planning, scheduling, controlling, and distribution of a software build.
Expert in automation:
Quite self-explanatory. The go-to person for any automation-related issues. Software testers are in charge of all software testing related to DevOps.
QA lead:
Assures quality and standard adherence throughout the DevOps department.
Sec DevOps engineer:
Takes the lead in integrating proper security measures into your release cycle and other DevOps procedures.
