The Path to Becoming a DevOps Engineer

July 11, 2019

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Career choices can often baffle newbies. Knowledge is the key in making a decision. Here’s a guide to career options in the DevOps engineering field. This article will guide new entrants to the IT industry on the many roles that DevOps engineers can assume, the job requirements and the certifications necessary to obtain those positions in the IT industry. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

In the 21st century, technology has evolved to meet the challenges faced in IT management across various segments. The technological advances and changes have been sweeping, rapid, and encompass multiple fields like the Agile methodology, DevOps, Big Data, cloud computing and machine learning. Prior to DevOps, software development faced countless challenges like changes in the system, deployments that were fraught with risks, and the lack of consistency across platforms. Development teams struggled to overcome these hurdles.

DevOps (development plus operations) has now been taken to the central stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC). It offers process frameworks mixed with open source tools to integrate all phases of the application’s life cycle, and ensures that everything functions as a cohesive unit. It aims to align and automate the process across the phases of development, testing, deployment and support. It includes the best methodologies and practices such as code repositories, build automation and continuous deployment, among others.

DevOps can be defined as, “A set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.”

It can also defined as, “An evolution of the ideas of Agile software development and lean manufacturing, applied to the end-to-end value chain in IT, which allows businesses to achieve more with modern information technologies, due to cultural, organisational and technical changes.”
According to the Second Annual GitLab Global Developer Survey conducted in March 2018, “Thirty-five per cent of the respondents have already established the DevOps culture and a mere 23 per cent describe their development method as DevOps.” The survey adds, “Sixty-five per cent of the respondents believe that the DevOps workflow saves them time during the development process and 29 per cent plan to invest in DevOps in 2018.”

The worldwide survey indicates a steady increase in DevOps adoption by enterprises from varied sectors and regions. As a set of cultural philosophies, practices and tools, DevOps aims to accelerate the delivery of high-quality products and services by unifying software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops).

Top reasons behind the global adoption of DevOps

Accelerates and extends the Agile methodology: Many global organisations adopt the Agile methodology to accelerate software delivery and improve software quality. This unifies software development and testing activities. With DevOps, the Agile methodology can be extended by integrating software development, testing and development activities, thereby, speeding up software delivery by removing the bottlenecks.
Strong communication and collaboration: With DevOps, programmers, testers and operations test engineers work as a single team. In this environment, every member has a strong understanding of pre-defined business requirements and organisational goals, which they can attain by working in a collaborative manner, focusing on the common goal rather than on individual goals. It creates a strong environment for experimentation, innovation and research.
Automation of repetitive tasks: With DevOps, organisations adopt automation tools and strong production platforms that help operations engineers to deploy the software applications without investing extra time and effort. The testing professionals can use test automation tools to evaluate the software under varied user conditions and produce more accurate test results. The automation of common and routine tasks helps businesses to reduce development cycles and shorten delivery cycles.
Reduction in failures: DevOps is focused on shorter development cycles and frequent code releases. As the programmers focus on a specific feature or component of the software application, they can easily write high-quality code and repair common coding errors. At the same time, the testers can detect the flaws in the software and get them repaired without any delay. Hence, enterprises can reduce failures and fixes significantly by adopting DevOps.
Creating a performance-based work environment: DevOps enables enterprises to modernise and transform the work environment by focusing only on performance. The unified work environment makes various stakeholders in the project collaborate with each other without bureaucratic obstacles. Also, software developers and operations engineers can perform optimally by understanding their roles and sharing risks.

DevOps life cycle
The DevOps life cycle comprises various stages and is highlighted in Figure 1. The terms in this figure are explained below.

Plan: Initial planning with regard to the type of application required
Code: Coding the application as per the client’s requirements with proper planning
Build: Building the application by integrating the various types of code created by diverse programmers in the coding phase
Test: Testing of the application built so far to verify and validate the requirements, and re-build the applications if components are not working effectively
Releases: Deploying the application in live scenarios
Deploy: Deployment of the cloud in cloud environments for additional usage
Operate: Performing operations on code, if any
Monitor: Strong monitoring of the application as per the client’s requirements and validating the end user experience

The roles and responsibilities of team members in DevOps
DevOps engineer: This person needs to have a core understanding of the SDLC and in-depth knowledge of various automation tools for developing digital pipelines (CI/CD).