DevOps isn’t magic, but it can look like it from the outside. In today’s job market, workers in innovative fields are creating new roles for themselves. The role of DevOps Engineer is one example.
The DevOps Engineer is truly a renaissance person of cloud infrastructure IT services. It is often difficult to understand this role because the DevOps Engineer is the product of a dynamic workforce that has not yet finished evolving. That’s why career path required to become a DevOps Engineer is not clearly defined. DevOps professionals come from several IT backgrounds and start the role in different places in their career.
What we do know about DevOps engineering is that it encompasses a role that was built out of the need of organizations to fully embrace cloud infrastructure in dedicated, multi-tenant, and hybrid environments. Further, we know that the role is growing quickly based on Google Trends and volume of job postings on sites like Dice.com:
Team
A critical role of a DevOps Engineer is to be an excellent communicator. In this way, DevOps Engineers are similar to IT Project Managers. They typically work on a DevOps team with other professionals in a similar role, each managing their own piece of the infrastructure puzzle.
DevOps is unique since it has been created to bridge the gap between software development teams and IT operations. (That’s where the name DevOps comes from.) A good way to think of these departments is to view them as being two sides of the same coin, who sometimes have trouble sharing each other’s vision.
The DevOps Engineer serves an important role on each team and liaises between both.
While the demands of a DevOps Engineer often require him or her to work alone, they are expert collaborators. This is because their role requires them to build upon the work of their counterparts on development and IT teams to:
- Scale cloud programs
- Create workflow processes
- Assign tenants
- And more
It isn’t uncommon for DevOps to be called to mentor software developers and architecture teams within an organization to teach them how to create software that is easily scalable. They also collaborate with IT and security teams to ensure quality releases. Some DevOps teams include DevSecOps, which applies DevOps principles to proactive security measures.
The DevOps Engineer is an important IT team member because they work with internal customers, including:
- QC personnel
- Software and application developers
- Project managers
- Project stakeholders (usually from within your organization)
DevOps engineers rarely work with external customers or end-users, but keep a “customer first” mindset to satisfy the needs of their internal clients.
The DevOps Engineer is a customer-service oriented, team player who can emerge from a number of different work and educational backgrounds, but through their experience has developed the right skillset to move into DevOps.
Experience required
A DevOps role in most organizations requires experience with:
- Integration technology
- Automation
- Cloud coding languages
This experience is typically gained by Systems Managers, IT Project Managers, or Database Administrators (DBAs), among many possible career paths. Almost every DevOps job requires at least 2-3 years’ experience with continuous integration, DevOps, and related experience.
DevOps Engineers specialize in writing code to amend existing cloud platforms rather than for the creation of new ones. That’s why organizations that use DevOps deploy code more frequently and with more accuracy than their competitors. So, someone who is interested in career pathing into DevOps should be experienced in several open source technologies and have a broad knowledge of technology used by DevOps engineers.
In addition to the above experience requirements, DevOps Engineers typically need a 4-year undergraduate degree in a related field.
