DevOps engineer technical skills

The top DevOps engineers have a diverse skillset:

When your organization adopts a DevOps philosophy, it indicates that change is on the way, and engineers are caught in the crossfire. Every growth plan necessitates a unique set of abilities tailored to the context. Let's go through the fundamental competencies of a great DevOps engineer.

What skills does a DevOps engineer need?

The primary objective of DevOps is to provide high-value features in short periods of time through collaborating across teams. As a result, in order to be effective, a DevOps engineer must possess certain interpersonal, tooling, and technical abilities. In other words, a DevOps engineer must possess both "soft" and "hard" abilities.

You're in good condition if you already have some of these. If not, this should serve as a foundation for you to enhance and polish your current skill set.

Communication and Collaboration Capabilities:

DevOps takes a team-oriented approach to software creation, testing, and deployment. It brings together small teams with diverse goals to collaborate toward more efficient and high-quality code releases. There must be no boundaries between the many personas, making communication skills (both verbal and written) essential for a successful DevOps engineer.

Engineers must communicate with internal management teams participating in the DevOps process on a frequent basis to keep current on the objectives, roadmap, blocking issues, and other project areas. Furthermore, they must successfully interact with consumers regarding assistance concerns. Communication skills are essential, but so is the capacity to collaborate. DevOps engineers should be team players that help their co-workers throughout sprints or product revisions. You should be ready to mentor and advise team members on the simplest ways to supply code, what tools to use when coding, and the way to check the newest features, in addition to being a good colleague.

familiarity with and comprehension of the DevOps toolchain:

A DevOps engineer must be able to handle a variety of sophisticated tools that operate together to support software delivery goals, in addition to collaboration and communication.

A DevOps engineer must be able to handle a variety of complicated technologies in addition to cooperation and communication.

DevOps engineers must be familiar with and understand the responsibilities of the following tools:

• Servers for Continuous Integration and Version Control
• Configuration administration
• Automation of deployment
• Containers
• Orchestration of Infrastructure
• Analytics and monitoring
• Cloud Quality and Testing Tools
• Protocols for networks

It is your duty to guarantee that everything works properly during the pre-and post-production processes. Every instrument in the pipeline has a function, so understanding how and when each contributes, as well as which dependencies to consider, is critical to a faultless delivery chain.

Mature Coding Standards with Specific Programming Skills:

Despite the fact that programming abilities are necessary for all development techniques, DevOps engineers have a distinct set of coding duties. Rather than specializing in a single programming language, a DevOps engineer should be fluent in many, including Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Bash, and others. A DevOps engineer must be experienced in creating and debugging bugs in these languages, as well as in operating system settings.

DevOps engineers should use their coding talents to either orchestrate a reliable and efficient pipeline that is as automated as feasible or to create new technologies that can automate pipeline phases to improve team operations.

More significantly, a DevOps engineer must be well-versed in test automation. You must first build clean code in various languages, and then verify that your code interacts flawlessly with the code generated by other teams – frequently in different settings.

A DevOps engineer must be well-versed in test automation. You must first build clean code in various languages, and then verify that your code interacts flawlessly with the code generated by other teams – frequently in different settings.

Furthermore, because DevOps is all about CI/CD, you must be able to reliably handle complicated automated delivery pipeline phases using Jenkins and/or other servers. As you automate operations or enter code changes into the pipeline, this demands discipline, attention to detail, and end-to-end knowledge.

Syncing with Quality Assurance Teams:

Keeping foregoing in mind, DevOps engineers must maintain constant communication with QA teams. To guarantee that the business fulfills sprint targets for release dates and results, all testing efforts, including automated and manual, must be understood and visible to DevOps engineers. The DevOps engineer should understand:

• the testing activities that occur;
• the history of testing across the CI/CD cycle; and
• the frameworks/environments that are driven by QA.

With this knowledge, the DevOps engineer can determine relevant deployment and optimization steps, as well as whether there are QA activities, tools, and frameworks that can be reused for other DevOps tasks, such as reproducing production issues, working with specific test environments, and accessing QA platforms.

As previously said, DevOps engineers should be familiar with test automation in order to move more quickly with daily deliverables such as product monitoring and testing. For businesses going toward DevOps, we propose that the DevOps engineer work closely with QA to discover what existing test automation frameworks are available.

There is no way to automate and maintain 100% of testing operations, just like there is no way to automate and maintain 100% of other tasks. As a result, the DevOps engineer must leave flexibility for manual and guided exploratory testing and have an open mind.

Test Although automation excels at following the happy route, exploratory testing is required to:

• Explore alternate paths that consumers will take
• Test situations that are too complicated to automate
• Test scenarios with insufficient ROI overtime to justify automation

Manual testing, which Applause specializes in and is powered by testing teams sourced from its global community, provides significant added value from an exploratory standpoint, allowing for creativity, alternate and changing flows, unexpected yet reasonable inputs and outputs, and a variety of other factors that are more closely aligned with how a real user will interact with your product.

DevOps engineers who can strike the proper balance between what should be automated and what should be left for human testing will put the products they serve in the greatest position for success in an increasingly competitive environment. Keeping this in mind, it should be emphasized that such balance will and must evolve in tandem with changes to the systems under test and the tests themselves.

DevOps abilities that are not functional:

DevOps engineers must be skilled in monitoring production environments and performance metrics, as well as security and cloud management, in addition to “soft” talents. This assists in ensuring that new builds operate correctly in production. Building Infrastructure as Code (IaC) offers velocity and automation in many businesses. As a result, a DevOps engineer should be familiar with such technologies. Finally, DevSecOps, which incorporates security principles into DevOps operations, is emerging as a critical pillar in the pipeline. Because DevOps necessitates that code be provided in tiny chunks, DevOps engineers should take an active part in assuring the security of the delivered code.

Skills in Technical Support and Maintenance

A good DevOps engineer does more than just execute on the development side; they also support and manage a streamlined approach that encompasses IT operations. A DevOps engineer controls and manages the core tools and environments used by the whole DevOps team, which may include customer-facing skills. This implies that a DevOps engineer should be able to serve both internal and external clients and fix issues as they emerge.

A DevOps engineer will also demonstrate knowledge on how to assure the uptime and availability of production systems.

This implies that DevOps engineers must be able to:

• Monitor the products in real-time;
• Receive proper notifications when anything is incorrect or unavailable; and
• Assist in the resolution of problems via online help or technical debugging.

DevOps management requires that the solution be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the DevOps engineers play a critical role in this.

Conclusion:

DevOps is based on people from many roles working together to achieve the same goal: quick, continuous delivery of high-quality code. DevOps engineers are the motor that propels the team forward in this quest. They are the ones who provide practitioners with assistance through automated tools, testing, and orchestration techniques.

As the market evolves, it is only natural for the job of the DevOps engineer to expand and absorb additional responsibilities, particularly in non-functional areas like security and monitoring analytics. Begin by concentrating on the talents and duties outlined above, and you'll find yourself in great demand.