What is DevOps Engineer? Skills, Roles & Responsibilities

Are you wondering what DevOps in software engineering is? DevOps manages the development, support, and testing processes in the life cycle of a software development project. It grew out of the experience and best practices of managing these processes. These practices help companies manage development, tool deployment, and testing and help with more speed and efficiency. At the same time, they make the DevOps engineer responsible for the essential parts of continuous integration and deployment.

While talking about the Scrum Master, don't forget to check out the article how to become a DevOps Engineer. 

IT Industry Before DevOps

Before DevOps, the development, testing, and support departments worked in separate areas. As a result, there were potential gaps and the problem increased significantly. The condition worsened when different people were in charge of the same tasks. Such barriers were significant causes of misunderstandings, miscommunications, and conflicts in setting priorities. Besides, these individual processes also hurt productivity, which makes customers unhappy. The concept of DevOps emerged to solve the existing challenges. So, what is the role of devops engineer? The new two-in-one job aimed to close these gaps, eliminate complexities and save time.

Also, it has several technical benefits, such as continuous delivery, early problem detection and correction, and easy project management. The business benefits from faster delivery, better management of KPIs, and better teamwork. These things are significant to how the customer feels.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to DevOps and explain what is a DevOps developer? Also, we will discuss DevOps engineer’s job roles in designing and developing automated deployment arrangements. Furthermore, guidance on the best devops courses will also be discussed at the end. 

Let’s Start! 

DevOps Engineer - An Overview

DevOps is a software development approach that helps developers and IT staff work together better. With DevOps, companies can quickly release small features and add feedback in real-time. What does a DevOps engineer do? They ensure that software fails less often and that the time between fixes is shorter. It gets around all of the problems with the old waterfall model. Many developments, testing, and deployment technologies are used in the DevOps process to build automated CI/CD pipelines. 

Maybe you wondering what a DevOps engineer is? A DevOps engineer is a generalist in IT who should know a lot about both operations and development, such as how to code, manage infrastructure, run systems, and use DevOps toolchains. DevOps engineers also need to be an all-rounder since they work across company silos to make the workplace more collaborative. 

What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?

A DevOps Engineer watches the code releases and works with other developers. They are either developers who are interested in network operations and deployment or sysadmins who love coding and scripting and move into the development side so that they can enhance the planning of tests and deployment. 

DevOps engineers must have a strong knowledge of the primary system architecture, provisioning, and administration. They also need experience with the classical developer toolset and practices, like using source control, receiving and giving code reviews, writing unit tests, and being familiar with agile principles. 

Team Up  

A crucial part of being a DevOps Engineer is communicating well. DevOps Engineers are a lot like IT Project Managers in this way. They work on a team with other specialists who do similar jobs most of the time. Each person is in charge of a different part of the infrastructure. 

What devops engineer do is unique because it helps IT operations and software development teams work together better. (That's why it's called "DevOps.") Consider these departments as the same entities that don't always agree on what needs to be done. 

The DevOps Engineer is a vital member of both teams and communicates. Even though DevOps Engineer often has to work alone, they are very good at working with others. This is because their job requires them to build on the work of their colleagues in the development and IT teams to scale cloud programs, make workflow processes, and assign tenants. 

DevOps engineer is often asked to help software developers or architecture teams in an organization learn how to create software that they can quickly scale. They also work with the IT and security teams to make sure releases are good. Some DevOps teams use DevSecOps, which takes DevOps principles and applies them to security measures taken ahead of time. 

The DevOps Engineer is a significant IT team member because they work with internal customers, including: 

• QC personnel 
• Developers of software and apps 
• Project managers 
• Project stakeholders from within the organization. 

DevOps engineers don't usually work with external customers or end-users, but they always put the needs of their internal clients first. 

The DevOps Engineer is a team player who cares about customer service. They can come from various educational and work backgrounds but have the right skills to move into DevOps through their experience. Enrolling in the best devops best training is also an excellent way to get hands-on experience and get job-ready. Moreover, you will learn DevOps and what they do in practice. 

In the next section, we will discuss the job expectancy of a DevOps professional. Also, detailed insight into the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer will be discussed.

Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

What DevOps engineers do varies from company to company. However, their roles in general is same for all. Mostly, infrastructure provisioning, release engineering, security, management, system administration, to name a few, are the most basic roles in DevOps. 

Release engineering helps build and install application code. The tools and processes depend on programming language, pipeline automation, and production infrastructure type - premise or cloud. Release engineering involves choosing, setting up, and maintaining CI/CD tools. Often, DevOps professionals use this in practice for writing and maintaining build/deploy scripts unique to the project. 

It involves infrastructure provisioning and system administration. Also, setting up, maintaining the servers and networking resources needed to host applications. That means managing physical servers, switches, storage devices, and virtualization software for companies is effortless and time saving. Best of all, managing virtual copies of the same parts for a hybrid or fully cloud-based business is the most lucrative option. 

DevOps advocacy is often undervalued or not even thought of, but it may be the essential thing a DevOps engineer does. The change to a DevOps culture can be annoying and hard to understand for the engineering team. As the organization's expert on DevOps, it's up to the DevOps engineer to help spread the word and teach people about the DevOps way. 

DevOps engineers should be able to handle many different things at once, do more than one thing at a time, and show flexibility. Now, let us focus on what is DevOps Engineer's role? 

• Documentation: Writes specs and instructions for the features on the server-side. 
• Systems analysis: Looks at the already being used technology and comes up with ways to improve and grow it. The DevOps engineer helps with urgent needs for analytics. 
• Development: DevOps engineer is responsible for developing, coding, building, installing, configuring, and maintaining IT solutions.
• Planning a project: Takes part in project planning meetings to share what they know about system options, risks, effects, and costs vs. benefits. DevOps engineers also talk about operational needs and development plans. 
• Testing: Testing code, processes, and deployments to find ways to make things run more smoothly and reduce mistakes. 
• Deployment: Updates and fixes are automatically put into the production environment with the help of configuration management software. 
• Maintenance and troubleshooting: Do routine application repairs to ensure smooth production runs. Develops health maintenance procedures and align with the guidelines. 
• Performance management: Suggests ways to improve performance by gap analysis, finding alternative solutions, and helping with changes. 
• Management: Depending on how big the company is, the DevOps engineer may also manage a team of DevOps engineers. 

Skills Required to be a DevOps Engineer

The technical skills a DevOps engineer needs depend on the team's structure, the technologies used, and the tool sets. Still, it's essential to have good communication and teamwork skills. A DevOps engineer should also have a good grasp of all the parts of a delivery pipeline and know the pros and cons of available tools and services.

1. Communication Skills  

What a DevOps engineer do is communicate effectively. Communication and collaboration are essential in DevOps competition because they work. These two factors are significant for breaking down the walls between the Dev and Ops teams, aligning the teams' goals with the business's goals, and putting the DevOps culture into place across departments. 

2. Soft Skills and a Good Thoughts 

It's not enough to know how to code and automate things. DevOps needs you to be different, with good soft skills, self-motivation, flexibility, and the ability to learn. DevOps professionals should not only listen but also do. 

They should know that DevOps change involves talking with stakeholders, being aware of business goals, assessing and finding places to improve, and being driven by collaboration. 

3. Knowledge of Relevant Tools 

The success of DevOps is utterly dependent on the tools used at different stages of its implementation. DevOps brought in so many tools that it's hard even to count them. But the importance of making DevOps work needs to be discussed in detail. 

4. Security Skills  

Most of the time, the rate of risks is the same as the speed of deployment that DevOps makes possible. With this limitation, security at the end or a separate process might not work with the traditional method. DevSecOps is helpful because it builds security into the SDLC process from the beginning. So, having DevSecOps skills will help a DevOps professional do better at their job. 

5. Automation Skills 

To become a DevOps engineer, you'll need to know a lot about automation, which is the core of the DevOps process. A DevOps engineer should be able to automate the whole DevOps pipeline, which includes things like CI/CD cycles, monitoring app performance, infrastructure, and configurations. 

Are you looking to skill up and get ready for a DevOps profile? Register in KnowledgeHut’s best DevOps courses and learn from IT industry experts.

DevOps automation skills are closely tied to knowledge of coding and scripting and the DevOps toolset. 

6. Scripting and Coding  

Coding and scripting are essential skills that DevOps engineers should have. Examples of programming languages include Python, Java, Javascript, Shell, and Node. Js are some of the most recommended languages for programming. 

7. Cloud Skills 

Cloud and DevOps go hand in hand all the time. One affects and is affected by the other in terms of how well it works. The DevOps method drives a process, the cloud makes it possible to automate DevOps by providing the necessary CI/CD toolset and a way to keep track of resources. 

8. Testing Skills 

Testing is a vital part of making DevOps work. For the DevOps automation pipeline to work, tests will need to run well and not fail. This is critical to the success of continuous testing, where automated tests are run. 

9. Customer-Focused Approach  

Any successful DevOps process aims to make sure the customer is happy. DevOps professionals should ensure that every task they aligns with business goals and gives the end-user something of value. 

They will need to work with stakeholders like developers, testers, project managers, and the organization's thought leaders to reach a common goal. 

10. Proactiveness  

Overall, DevOps engineers and professionals will need to be proactive and excited about their work, which will show in their performance and output. Also, part of your process is keeping up with new tools, relevant technologies, and more. 

11. Solving problems skills  

DevOps engineers need to be able to find problems or slowdowns in standard processes and procedures quickly. They suggest improving processes and fixing issues as required to meet expectations. 

12.  System administration 

A DevOps engineer should have skills in system administration tasks like setting up and managing servers, launching databases, monitoring security, patching systems, and managing how networks connect internally and externally. 

13.  Experience in Using DevOps tools  

Since using the proper tools is an integral part of DevOps, DevOps engineers should be able to understand and use a wide range of tools. These tools cover the whole DevOps lifecycle, from setting up the infrastructure and building a product or service to monitoring and running it. 

14. Configuration management 

Most of the time, DevOps engineers are expected to know how to use at least one configuration management tool, like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible. Many organizations use these or similar tools to perform system administration tasks like setting up new systems or adding security patches to running systems. 

15. Containers and orchestration of containers 

With containerization, Docker's popular technology, the code for an application and its runtime environment are included in the same image. This means that traditional tools for managing configurations are less critical. At the same time, managing containers has its problems, and a DevOps engineer needs to know how to use tools like Docker Swarm or Kubernetes, which are part of a group called "container orchestrators." 

You can automate the deployment and integration process with a few tools. If you want to become a DevOps engineer, learning about deployment tools and custom automation scripts that help with continuous delivery might be good. Here are some of these tools: 

• Source control tools: Tools like Jira and Subversion that keep track of project changes are source control tools. This makes it easy to change the code back to an older version. It's constructive when new bugs show up because you can look at a code version that works and compare it to the current version to find problems and fix them. 
• Continuous integration tools: Tools such as Jenkins, Buildbot, and Buddy let developers constantly know how software has been deployed is doing. These tools can let you know when there are problems so you can fix them right away. 
• Team management tools: There are many tools for managing teams, like Agile Manager and Agile Bench. Both help you organize team tasks, keep track of their status, and plan. 
• Visualization tools: Visualization helps you see how your whole system works, so you can find problems faster and plan for growth. A lucid chart can help you visualize complex networks, codebases, and infrastructure. You can share these diagrams with team members to help them work together from anywhere. 

Also, check for the important blog on DevOps Engineer Salary. 

Increasing Demand for DevOps Engineers

DevOps is a way of working that needs a change in culture, new ways of managing and using technology tools. A DevOps engineer is at the center of a DevOps transition and needs a wide range of skills to make this change happen.

Still, most companies will need more than one DevOps engineer. Instead, they will need a mix of generalists and experts who can work together to implement DevOps and keep improving the software development process. A DevOps engineer helps break down silos so that different experts and toolchains can work together to make the most of what DevOps offers. 

Experience and Expertise Requirements

Check out the experience and expertise required for a DevOps profile: 

• A DevOps job requires knowledge of integration technology, cloud coding languages, and automation in most companies.
• Systems Managers, IT Program Managers, and Database Administrators, among other jobs, often get this kind of experience. Almost every DevOps job requires at least two to three years of experience in continuous integration, DevOps, and other related skills. 
• DevOps Engineers write code to change existing cloud platforms, not to make new ones. Because of this, companies that use DevOps can send out code more often and more accurately than their competitors. So, if you want to work as a DevOps engineer, you should have experience with many open source technologies and know a lot about the technology they use. 
• In addition to the experience mentioned above, most DevOps Engineers need a 4-year bachelor's degree in any related field. 

Conclusion

Early reactions to how organizations are using DevOps have been positive. The incredible results DevOps is bringing on companies culture justifies its high demand. Many companies view it as philosophy to orchestrate their employees hierarchy and drive business forward. 

The idea behind it is that everyone in the company is responsible for the overall success of the process. Since there are still a lot of unknowns about DevOps Engineer roles, it's hard for hiring managers to define them and find the right person for the job. 

However, the right person needs to know about infrastructure automation, deployment automation, and version control. You can learn these skills in many IT jobs, mostly in software development and running specific programs.