The DevOps Role
A DevOps engineer specializes in developing and ensuring the efficient operation of software development, testing, and deployment processes, enabling fast and reliable delivery of new features and bug fixes.
DevOps Teams
Let us look at several types of teams in which a DevOps engineer may work:
- Imagine there is a DevOps team -- this does not mean that everyone in it is a DevOps engineer. Instead, they may simply follow DevOps principles and use the corresponding tools. This is a small cross-functional team.
- There is a team with an engineer holding the DevOps title. This person is responsible for, for example, release automation, infrastructure setup, monitoring tools, and the adoption of DevOps practices.
- There are teams that consist solely of DevOps consultants. Their task is to provide DevOps services to other teams within companies and implement changes centrally.
DevOps Responsibilities
The responsibilities of a DevOps engineer depend on the specific needs of the team and the company's strategy, but the main ones include:
- Advocating DevOps practices, meaning the engineer is responsible for introducing and promoting DevOps methodologies and best practices within the team.
- Automating processes, including CI/CD, to accelerate software development and deployment.
- Building tools and scripts to automate tasks that streamline workflows and improve efficiency.
- Infrastructure security, including access control and vulnerability monitoring.
- Developing and maintaining a platform and shared tools that can be used by all teams in the organization to improve development.
DevOps Skills
The skills of a DevOps engineer span a variety of areas; here are some of them:
- Programming, since there is often a need to write code for automating tasks or developing custom tools.
- Linux is the standard for infrastructure, so having deep knowledge of this operating system, including the ability to run code on Linux, is important.
- You should understand how to create database and system backups and how to restore them. This is critically important for ensuring system reliability.
- Container skills, especially Docker, are essential because they help isolate applications and their dependencies.
- Self-Healing. You should be able to configure applications so they can scale under load and recover from failures.
- Setting up Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment/Delivery (CI/CD) processes is important for development automation.
- Knowledge of cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, and GCP helps determine when and how to use their resources.
- The ability to automate infrastructure using tools such as Terraform helps ensure repeatability of infrastructure configurations.
- Knowledge of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) methods and understanding of basic architectural principles helps build fault-tolerant infrastructure.
- Skills in setting up monitoring and alerting systems are important for timely problem detection.
| DevOps Phase | Tools | ||
| Continuous Planning & Development | Gitlab | Maven | |
| GJT | Gradle | ||
| TFS | Confluence | ||
| SVN | Subversion | ||
| Mercurial | Scrum | ||
| Jira | Lean | ||
| Bit Bucket | Kanban | ||
| Trello | |||
| Continuous Integration | Jenkins | Travis and Circle CI | |
| Bamboo | Buddy | ||
| GitlabCI | |||
| Team City | |||
| Continuous Testing | Junit | Microfocus UFT | |
| Selenium | Test NG | ||
| JMeter | Tricentis Tosca | ||
| Cucumber | Jasmic | ||
| Test Sigma | |||
| Continuous Deployment | Ansile | Go | |
| Chef | Vagrant | ||
| Docker | Spinnaker | ||
| IBM Urban code | ArgoCD | ||
| Kubernetes | |||
| Puppet | |||
| Continuous Feedback | Webalizer | Flowdock | |
| W3 Perl | Open web Analytics | ||
| Service Now | Pendo | ||
| Slack | Qeutelli's TED | ||
| Continuous Operations | Kubernetes | ||
| Docker Swarm |