What Does a DevOps Engineer Do? A 2024 Career Guide

And in a digital-only or remote first environment, soft skills are even more critical. While we don’t have data on the growth rate of DevOps engineers specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does include this role in its overall data for software developers. Software developer employment is projected to grow 25 percent through 2031 — more than triple the average for all occupations.

DevOps engineers are instrumental in bridging the gap between development and operations teams, facilitating collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement throughout the software delivery lifecycle. This article explores some of the key tools and technologies utilized by DevOps engineers in their daily workflows. DevOps is a software engineering approach that combines development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to shorten the software development lifecycle (feature development, bug fixes, updates) by embracing automation. Candidates will often need to obtain several years of experience in product development, software development, or software engineering before entering the DevOps engineer role. DevOps is a methodology that has evolved from the experience and best practices of managing the development, testing, and support processes in a software development project life cycle.

Migration Program

Docker allows engineers to create consistent development, testing, and production environments. It also ensures the developed application is portable across different platforms. Learning networking fundamentals becomes vital to the DevOps team when working with software components constantly communicating with other services. Knowledge of networks comes in handy when setting up resources in the public cloud. At a minimum, you should clearly understand standard protocols(TCP/IP, UDP), routing, IP addressing, subnetting, and ports. Many of these guides lack structure and organization, resulting in a dilemma of where to start.

Python is a popular programming language that is easier to learn and used in various projects involving backend development, writing machine learning algorithms, automating everyday tasks, etc. This article provides in-depth knowledge on how to become a DevOps engineer, highlighting the mindset and technical skills(including DevOps tools) required to become one. In this program, you will build the DevOps skills required to automate the various aspects and stages of machine learning model building and monitoring. CI/CD introduces ongoing automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of apps, from integration and testing phases to delivery and deployment. DevOps processes such as CI/CD security can be used to safeguard code pipelines with automated checks and testing to prevent vulnerabilities in software delivery. To become a DevOps Engineer, you have to gain the knowledge and experience necessary to work with diverse teams and technologies.

DevOps engineer roles and responsibilities

If you are a newbie in software engineering, you are encouraged to learn the above skills and concepts. DevOps engineers must understand the risks entangled with changes to a software system and deployment infrastructures. The risk should be minimized by utilizing automated testing, monitoring, and incremental changes.

DevOps engineers are usually part of a product team or designated DevOps team within a company, and may perform project management duties within their team. They frequently collaborate with software developers, software engineers, system operators and other IT professionals to accomplish their work. Tasks like data management and library updates for new product releases combine with needs for leadership and collaboration across teams. It is important for DevOps engineers to understand the fundamentals of application development and delivery.

SRE principles and practices for your project

The key is to learn the skills, apply them, and build up the kind of portfolio that’ll impress employers and gain the confidence of team members. Some people think of DevOps as more of a cultural shift than an innovative development technique. A DevOps Engineer fosters a culture of communication, collaboration, and shared responsibility amongst all parties for the entire development lifecycle. 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.

As organisations in India and worldwide seek to strengthen their information technology capabilities, the need for skilled professionals also increases. Experienced DevOps engineers with a passion for innovation and entrepreneurship may choose to start their own consulting firms or technology startups. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound in areas such as DevOps consulting, cloud migration services, DevOps tool development, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions catering to DevOps needs.

What are DevOps Engineer skills?

The purpose of such roles is to ensure that any new application software being released into production meets quality and security standards and has the appropriate management approvals. Since using the right tools are essential to DevOps practices, the DevOps engineer must understand, and be able to use, a variety of tools. These tools span the DevOps lifecycle from infrastructure and building, to monitoring and operating a product or service. DevOps engineers should have a lot of experience with software tools and coding languages. You can work in IT, system administration or software development to get this experience.

These tools provide declarative or imperative approaches to infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing teams to define and enforce desired state configurations consistently across environments. Organizations rely on their DevOps engineers for guidance and leadership across devops engineer training their entire app development lifecycle. Although many DevOps engineers begin their careers as software developers or as IT management professionals, they usually also pick up new skills, methodologies, and strategies from other similar disciplines along the way.

Monitoring also lets you figure out how different systems affect each other, both when they’re running simultaneously and in sequence. Because containers can be spun up and shut down very quickly, containerization makes it easy and inexpensive to explore the effects of different aspects of software. A DevOps Engineer needs to understand containerization because it impacts how a product is built, adjusted, and tested. Each container acts as a virtual machine, running one piece of the overall process. The DevOps cultural shift may require executives and developers, for example, to hone their listening skills in ways they never had before. In the DevOps culture, all these parties are equally important, and their respective insights all carry the same value.

Learn what DevOps engineers do and how to get the skills you need to be a DevOps engineer. Organizations that have not transitioned to DevOps or are still in the early stages of doing so might have a separate group called the change advisory board (CAB) or an individual release manager role. After gaining more experience, a DevOps engineer often faces a crossroads in their career having to choose between a few paths.

how to become a senior software engineer: a guide

With containerization, a technology popularized by Docker, the code for the application and its runtime environment are bundled in the same image. At the same time managing containers brings its own challenges, and experience with the class of tools known as “container orchestrators” (e.g. Docker Swarm or Kubernetes) becomes a necessary skill for the DevOps engineer. Infrastructure provisioning and system administration include deploying and maintaining the servers, storage, and networking resources required to host applications.

• Most DevOps engineers possess a strong software development or IT operations background, along with a mix of other technical skills and soft skills from other disciplines.
• Candidates will often need to obtain several years of experience in product development, software development, or software engineering before entering the DevOps engineer role.
• On the other hand, DevOps engineers take a birds-eye view of the entire development process and work to make it more efficient.
• They often serve as the link between development teams and IT operations teams to help unify, optimize, and automate processes within the software development lifecycle.
• Configuration management tools enable DevOps engineers to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of infrastructure resources and application environments.