For organizations that are still stuck in the morasses of obsolete siloed structures, a system where development and operations teams work without the necessary collaboration, the implementation of DevOps can prove to be a game-changer.
But the successful implementation of DevOps is an organization-wide overhaul that demands the right kind of people, an ever-learning culture, and cutting-edge tech assets that facilitate seamless communication and collaboration.
To Implement a DevOps restructuring in your business, you first need DevOps consulting services replete with expert engineers. But wait. DevOps is a methodology, not a block of code. So who is a DevOps engineer? What does he do? Read on as we delve deep into what a DevOps Engineer is and what function he performs during DevOps implementation.
So without further ado, let’s get to it.
The ideal DevOps development company sports teams of DevOps engineers who are IT professional with a deep understanding of both development and operations. A DevOps engineer should understand coding as well as infrastructure management, DevOps Toolchains, and system administration. M3ost importantly, a DevOps engineer must possess honed interpersonal communication skills, given that he acts as a point of contact across departmental silos to nurture collaboration within the organization.
The Ideal DevOps engineer must know system provisioning and administration and must also be comfortable working on standard development toolsets. He must understand practices like source control, code reviews, unit testing and should be familiar with work environments that function based upon the agile development methodology.
The role of a DevOps engineer within an organization varies from enterprise to enterprise. Broadly speaking, a DevOps engineer is involved in DevOps advocacy, system administration, release engineering, infrastructure provisioning, and management and security. Here is a rundown of the day-to-day responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer
Frequently, DevOps faces undervaluation and, in some extreme cases, overlooked completely. This makes DevOps tools advocacy one of the most pertinent responsibilities of a DevOps engineer. Shifting to a DevOps culture can initially be unnerving and disruptive to the workflow of an engineering team. As an expert on the subject, a DevOps engineer must evangelize the DevOps methodology and hand-hold employees through the transition.
A DevOps Engineer must know how to deploy and maintain servers, storage space, and network resources required to host the enterprise’s tech assets and applications. In the case of businesses with on-prem assets like storage devices, physical servers, visualization software, and other data center components, a DevOps Engineer must take ownership of the maintenance and development of said resources.
For an organization with its resources on a cloud server, a DevOps engineer must provide and manage virtual instances of the assets mentioned above.
Release engineering is yet another scope of work that falls within the responsibilities of a DevOps services professional. Release engineering is the process of actually building and deploying application code. While the tools and process required for this function may vary from organization to organization, e.g., the programming language used, level of automation in the pipeline, location of the production infrastructure (on-prem/cloud), and maintaining CI/CD tooling while writing and deploying custom build/deploy scripts.
Factors like team structure, technologies, and toolsets used by a specific organization determine the required skillsets of a DevOps engineer. Two of the essential soft skills that a DevOps engineer must possess are a collaborative mindset and lucid communication. A DevOps engineer must also have an in-depth knowledge of all components within the delivery pipeline and understand the pros and cons of each tool and service available. Read on for a rundown of the desired skillsets of the ideal DevOps engineer.
A DevOps engineer must collaborate and communicate with diverse teams, departments, managers, and clients. Ever so often, these soft skills are not given appropriate weightage and are undervalued. Interestingly the entire DevOps methodology rests heavily on the quality of communication and acceptance levels of feedback across the business’s value stream.
Ideally, a DevOps engineer should have hands-on system administration knowledge, including managing and provisioning servers, security monitoring, database deployment, system patching, and managing internal and external network uptimes.
The Ideal DevOps engineer must be an expert in at least one configuration management tool like Chef, Puppet, or Ansible. Many businesses have incorporated these tools in their workflow to seamlessly automate administrative processes like new system deployment or the application of security patches to their system infrastructure.
Containerization is a technology popularized by Docker. In IT application code and the respective runtime environment is bundled into the same image. This makes legacy configuration tools obsolete. Managing containers comes with its own set of challenges, and the ideal DevOps engineer must be conversant with container orchestrators like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm.
Continuous integration and continuous Delivery, fondly known as the CI/CD pipeline, is a core practice of the DevOps methodology. The use of a CI/CD toolset is the automation of building testing and deploying effective and efficient software.
The ideal DevOps engineer must have extensive experience configuring and deploying at least two CI/CD toolsets. He must work closely with the development team and ensure that the CI/CD tools have been deployed optimally.
Traditional system administrators know how to write ‘shell scripts’ that can effectively automate repetitive tasks. The ideal DevOps engineer must go beyond merely writing automation scripts and build a deep understanding of the latest software development practices. He must know how to effectively deploy agile development practices like source control and frequent code reviews.
DevOps is all about collaboration and flexibility, and it is only natural for the role of a DevOps engineer to transcend silos of specific responsibility. When you Hire DevOps engineer, keep in mind that DevOps as a practice demands an organization-wide culture shift, new management principles, and the acceptance of technology as a tool for business success.
A DevOps engineer acts as the heart of DevOps Transformation efforts within an organization. Most enterprises will require more than one dedicated DevOps resource, a cohesive mixture of It generalists and specialists working in a collaborative environment towards implementing DevOps to improve the software development lifecycle.
Summing it all up, a DevOps engineer is tasked with breaking down silos and enabling collaboration across departments and their experts to realize the capabilities of DevOps transformation solutions.
