Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash
5 Skills you need to be a DevOps engineer
If I were to start for scratch
Table of contents
5 Skills you need to become a DevOps engineer
DevOps engineers are the key to success for many companies. Companies like Google and Amazon have been using DevOps for years, but even smaller businesses can utilize the benefits of a DevOps engineer. If you're interested in becoming a DevOps engineer, here are five skills that could help you land your first job:
Understanding of modern software development life cycle (SDLC)
When you are a DevOps engineer, you will be responsible for ensuring that your team’s software is delivered on time and within budget. You will have to work with different teams such as software development, quality assurance and customer support.
In order to do this, you need to understand the various roles involved in the software development life cycle (SDLC). You also need to understand how an SDLC model works and be able to work with different models such as Agile or waterfall model.
Ability to create CI/CD pipelines
The more you know about CI/CD pipelines, the better.
This is because a continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline is a set of automated tasks that are run in a sequence to build, test and deploy applications. These pipelines are used to deploy software automatically whenever changes are made to source code or content. This means developers can make changes to their project’s codebase without waiting for someone else to approve them, which helps organizations build apps faster than ever before.
In order for this process to be successful, it's essential that DevOps engineers understand how these workflows function so they can implement them at work or at home.
The ability to set up CI/CD pipelines is a critical skill for DevOps engineers. This ensures that they can automate the build and deployment of applications, which improves productivity and reduces errors. A DevOps engineer should be able to take responsibility for maintaining these systems as well as ensuring that all stakeholders understand their functions
Observability and understanding of monitoring tools
To be a successful devops engineer, you need to know how to monitor your applications and services. You need to understand what metrics are important for your application and how they relate to the business goals of your team. You also need to know how different monitoring tools work, how each tool measures different aspects of your application's performance, and which tools will help you detect problems quickly.
This is an area where many people get stuck because there are so many tools available with overlapping functionality that it's often hard for newbies (or even experienced engineers) to understand which ones best fit their needs. The good news is that there are some great resources out there that can help:
https://github.com/wmariuss/awesome-devops#observability-monitoring
https://github.com/Lets-DevOps/awesome-learning
https://github.com/devsecops/awesome-devsecops
Automation (Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, Ansible)
As a devops engineer, you need to be familiar with infrastructure automation. You should know at least one of the popular tools like Terraform, Ansible or Puppet that help you provision and configure your infrastructure in an automated way.
Terraform: A tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructures on cloud providers (Azure, AWS) and private servers. It supports multiple providers including Google Cloud Platform which makes it easy to build multi-cloud environments.
Ansible: An open source configuration management solution used for automating tasks across different servers. It can be used from terminal as well as GUI tools such as Tower by RedHat (free).
Puppet: Software that helps manage servers under Linux/Unix operating systems based on code written in Ruby language called Manifests which define how to configure each machine according to its role in our system architecture
Cloudformation: It is a service from AWS that helps you automate provisioning your cloud infrastructure. It consists of a collection of templates called stacks which define the configuration and resources to be created on an account. CloudFormation is available for all regions, including some of the new ones like EU (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Mumba)
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
You need to know how to code and be able to work with code (GitOps)
GitOps is a set of practices for automating your infrastructure and application delivery. GitOps is a DevOps approach that uses Git as the source of truth for all infrastructure changes—and therefore, makes it easy to automate deployments and rollbacks.
GitOps allows you to enforce security policies through code. If a developer tries to push an insecure configuration change, their branch will be rejected by continuous integration (CI) tests or automated scanners. To enforce compliance with these policies, you need to establish a baseline for your organization's security standards before putting them into place via GitOps.
more on gitOps: https://about.gitlab.com/topics/gitops/
All in all, there are many qualities that make a great DevOps engineer. But above all, you should have an attitude of collaboration and humility. DevOps engineers should be able to work with others, listen to their ideas and understand how they can help them. It's also important to have a good understanding of the technology being used in your team's projects so that if something goes wrong, it's easy to pinpoint where exactly things went wrong.
If you like to discuss devops with me grab some time on my calendar here: https://ksbdigital.com/