What Does a DevOps Engineer Do? A Career Guide

Teams will own a feature or project throughout the complete lifecycle from idea to delivery. This enhanced level of investment and attachment from the team leads to higher quality output. They empower DevOps practices by helping to improve collaboration, reduce context-switching, introduce automation, and enable observability and monitoring.

The most fundamental function of any CI/CD tool or set of tools is to automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software. Moving from a legacy infrastructure to using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and microservices can offer faster development and innovation, but the increased operational workload can be challenging. It’s best to build out a strong foundation of automation, configuration management, and continuous delivery practices to help ease the load.

metrics and KPIs in DevOps: how to evaluate your DevOps efforts (and why it matters)

They must thoroughly understand basic programming languages, such as Java, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Shell, Node.js, Bash, Ruby, and more. They must also have experience in Linux as the developers continue to use it even to this day. The DevOps engineer’s responsibilities are multi-prong – they need to be agile enough to wear a technical hat and manage operations simultaneously. DevOps is a dynamic and ever-evolving field, offering a multitude of career paths and advancement opportunities. As you develop experience and proficiency, you can investigate different specializations, leadership positions, and even start your own business. Atlassian’s Open DevOps provides everything teams need to develop and operate software.

For organizations with on-premise resources this might include managing physical servers, storage devices, switches, and virtualization software in a data center. For a hybrid or entirely cloud-based organization this will usually include provisioning and managing virtual instances of the same components. Automation is a critical part of an efficient DevOps lifecycle, devops engineer training decreasing hands-on work, and speeding testing, documentation and deployment. Once a process is automated, it needs to be continually improved upon, as needs and requirements throughout the process change. DevOps engineers are called on to continuously look for opportunities to improve, streamline, and automate the development and deployment process.

Monitoring

CI tools automate the process of integrating code changes from multiple developers into a shared repository, enabling teams to detect and address integration issues early in the development cycle. These platforms facilitate automated builds, testing, and code analysis, helping teams deliver high-quality software with greater speed and efficiency. Additionally, it brings various technical benefits such as continuous delivery, early detection and correction of problems, and easy management of the project. Business benefits are also super important, such as faster delivery, KPI management, and improved collaboration within the teams. The composition of a DevOps team can vary depending on the size and complexity of the organization.

Using the same tooling enables the team to change priorities quickly, set up tracking mechanisms, and keep track of ongoing releases. Read on to learn who you need to hire and what you need to account for to create an efficient DevOps team. Being part of a DevOps team means you have a responsibility for building a CI/CD pipeline and optimizing processes, people and tooling. DevOps-minded engineers will see ways they can constantly improve the pipeline – from people to processes. By increasing the frequency and velocity of releases, DevOps teams improve products rapidly.

Configuration management

The feedback loop is also quicker, so developers can address issues with more agility and accuracy. Engineers create solutions such as scripts or plugins that save the software developers’ time. These tasks do not require coding skills, but a DevOps engineer typically has mid-to-high scripting ability. The DevOps approach to software development aims for regular, incremental changes to code versions. However, DevOps engineers rarely code from scratch or work directly on product code.

It is essential to have excellent communication and coordination skills to successfully integrate various functions in a coordinated manner and deliver the responsibilities to the customer’s satisfaction. Typically, the development, testing, and support departments were used to working in silos, creating process gaps and conflict in duties as different people managed these functions. Such barriers were the significant causes of misunderstandings, miscommunications, and conflict in prioritization and were proven detrimental to productivity, resulting in customer dissatisfaction. DevOps’ evolution as an approach and a DevOps engineer job profile has tried to close these gaps to a great extent. DevOps engineers are responsible for infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure management, process automation, system administration, and security for an entire organization.

What does a DevOps Engineer do?

The traditional strategy is also built around infrequent, large deployments of software, that lends itself to long phases of fixing unforeseen issues and software failures. You can gain in-demand DevOps skills from an industry leader in technology with IBM’s Introduction to DevOps. In this beginner-friendly online course, you’ll learn about essential DevOps concepts like CI/CD, automation, and test driven development (TDD).

• DevOps enables companies to accelerate software development and deploy more reliable products.
• A DevOps engineer is responsible for leading and coordinating the activities of different teams to create and maintain a company’s software.
• With greater exposure to the production systems you’re building, developers are better at writing code that fits within the system’s parameters.
• If the team is not ready to take on this responsibility, the company should perfect continuous integration and delivery first.
• We’re looking for a DevOps Engineer to help build the most sophisticated consumer advocacy AI, reaching millions of customers.

Scaler’s DevOps course is designed to help students develop the skills they need to get jobs as DevOps engineers, SREs, or cloud engineers. As you gain experience and expertise, you might consider starting your own DevOps consulting business or offering freelance services. This allows you to apply your knowledge to a variety of projects and clients, while enjoying greater autonomy and flexibility. Optimize your software development capabilities by adding top talents from one of the leading outsourcing companies in the world; let our experience work for you. In most cases the title software developer is given to individuals who write either front-end or back-end application code, or both.

Who does a DevOps Engineer work with?

However, these key roles typically work together seamlessly, fostering a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement to achieve the goals of faster, more reliable software delivery. A versatile professional who connects software development and IT operations is a DevOps engineer. They are the orchestrators of the software delivery pipeline, ensuring that code is developed, tested, and deployed efficiently and reliably.

Examples of configuration management tools include Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack. These tools provide declarative or imperative approaches to infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing teams to define and enforce desired state configurations consistently across environments. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools are the engines that drive automated builds, testing, and deployments.

An engineering and IT organization that doesn’t work in silos will lead to improved ideas and productivity. It’s a way to build collaboration and transparency across software development and IT operations – leading to greater visibility for business teams and, ultimately, more revenue. Microservices is an architectural technique where an application is built as a collection of smaller services that can be deployed and operated independently from each other. Each service has its own processes and communicates with other services through an interface. This separation of concerns and decoupled independent function allows for DevOps practices like continuous delivery and continuous integration. Automation is one of the most important DevOps practices because it enables teams to move much more quickly through the process of developing and deploying high-quality software.