Well, you’ve probably heard something about DevOps thus far. If so, you may claim DevOps meaning a set of practices, not a person. You’re technically correct — however, the term has evolved and expanded.
Being a DevOps Engineer in 2021 is a tough task since you represent a mix of a Systems Administrator, a Site Reliability Engineer, and a QA Specialist. Moreover, in certain cases, you turn into a Project Manager or a Business Analyst.
A DevOps engineer facilitates collaboration between development and operations teams to achieve increased productivity. In other words, you turn ordinary workflows into awesome ones.
DevOps Engineers’ daily routine includes:
- Infrastructure management (It should work not only on your machine)
- Working on multiple platforms across different programming languages (Relax! Typically no JS)
- Automating workloads (A strong intention to automate everything)
- Continuous integration and deployment processes (Sure, Jenkins is an excellent choice)
- Support & live monitoring (Critical alerts at 3 AM? Lovely!)
- Version control systems management (Insidious git push -f origin master, followed by headaches)
- Maintaining security (“Projectname123” is a strong pass, definitely)
Feeling adventurous, aren’t you? Indeed, DevOps Engineers deal with a wide range of activities, technologies, and tools. They constantly need to learn and improve their skills. But what should you start with?
Start with Basics
A DevOps beginner should be aware of at least one OS, one scripting language, and one cloud computing service. The common basic stack includes Linux OS, Python programming language, and Amazon Web Services. These primary technologies compose a foundational road map every competent DevOps Engineer should know.
As soon as you got over the basics, proceed with the CI/CD pipeline. It’s a set of automated processes and tools to build and deploy code to a production environment. The pipeline can differ by project, but it typically includes the following repeatable stages: Plan, Code, Build, Test, Release, Deploy, Operate, Monitor.
Expand your knowledge layer by layer, learning one thing at a time. There’s no end to learning technology, so you can get stuck in any of these fields for years without ever switching to the next best thing.
But once you have a solid foundation with, for example, AWS, start getting familiar with GCP and study them in parallel. It might sound confusing and mix terms in your head at first, but you’ll learn them both much better — instead of focusing on GCP while your AWS knowledge fades without constant practice.
Skills to Master
One of DevOps goals is to improve collaboration between teams. Unfortunately, implementing CI/CD pipelines or containerizing your project won’t be enough.
This goal touches on another vast area to consider: soft & hard skills. Soft skills are interpersonal abilities that help people get along with each other and show better results. They are universal and hardly measurable. In contrast, hard skills are specific and measurable points that form the backbone of the job.
Soft Skills
Every HR manager will tell you that soft skills are as important as hard ones because employers value them equally. Speaking about DevOps, we can mention the top five soft skills to work on:
- Communication
The secret of improving collaboration lies exactly in communication. You should be able to communicate properly and efficiently, respecting others and expressing your thoughts decisively.
- Empathy
Being empathetic contributes to your success as a DevOps engineer. Adopt a team-first mindset and handle arguments to establish high-quality teamwork.
- Collaboration
It’s a central DevOps concept, so ensure you can work in a team bringing more cross-functionality to the processes.
- Attention to Detail
Sometimes a minor mistake can cost hours of work and millions of dollars, so professional DevOps engineers tend to double-check everything.
- Curiosity
Being curious helps you monitor the latest releases or fresh tools, stay up to date. Moreover, it allows you to think outside the box and better understand workflows or specific situations.
Hard Skills
This set of skills shows your professionalism, so there are plenty of points to operate with:
- System Administration
Configuring servers, checking the health of the system, and setting up effective alerts come exactly from system administration and represent the core responsibilities of DevOps engineers.
- Virtualization & Cloud
The key to running various systems alongside each other lies in knowing how to isolate them and meet performance requirements. With clouds, it becomes more about picking a particular combination of services rather than solve the task out of the box rather than spending time on setting up environments from scratch. Proficiency with cloud platforms covers a wide range of areas, from infrastructure architecture to cost optimization.
- Containerization
The container ecosystem helps to separate the app and facilitates testing processes. It offers a comfortable workflow and ensures smooth integrations. Docker is a well-known container manager, we highly recommend you to try it if you still haven’t.
- CI/CD
For many people, the whole CI/CD concept is still vague, so we cleared this up in our recent article. In brief, CI/CD establishes ongoing automation across the whole lifecycle of apps. And good DevOps engineers want to automate everything, don’t they?
- Source Control Management
They are used to track changes and maintain different versions of the app. The most popular version control systems are Git, CVS, SVN, Mercurial. You don’t need to be an expert in all of them except for Git, but understanding the basic principles behind each is mandatory.
- Programming Language
A successful DevOps engineer must be able to write and understand code. Otherwise, how will you plan the architecture of the app or choose a suitable solution for cloud migration?
- Networking
In DevOps, everything is connected — and knowing the nitty-gritty details of networks and protocols is the only way to ensure efficient and secure communication between various systems and their components. Sure, we live in the age of the web, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg — plenty of technologies rely on a deeper level of networking that takes a highly skillful engineer to configure and troubleshoot.
- Security
Hackers get into systems through vulnerabilities brought by faster development and deployment cycles. Therefore, DevOps Engineers need to consider the security implications of their flows to help protect apps from potential attacks and ensure all systems have defense mechanisms.
Sources
Enough talk, where to find this info?
The traditional option is to get a university degree in IT or a relevant field. But if you want to get more specific knowledge in short term, consider other variants. Here is a list of valuable sources to become a true expert:
- Courses (Udemy, Coursera, Hackr.io)
- Books (SRE series of books, Effective DevOps, The DevOps Handbook)
- Educational hubs (Medium, Stack Overflow, DevOps.com)
- Seminars & Webinars
- Workshops
Summary
Studying may seem scary and exhausting, however, it doesn’t mean you must constantly learn. You can’t know everything, so it’s perfectly fine. Set aside about 30 mins daily to practice new skills. Cover the basics and look for job opportunities.
The good news is you’ll get much more knowledge in real work. An experienced mentor will lead you through the DevOps jungle holding the torch of wisdom to light your way.
Good luck in the journey to becoming a DevOps engineer!
