IT Education What is a DevOps engineer and what do they do?

What is a DevOps engineer and what do they do?

Read on to learn what DevOps is, what a DevOps Engineer does, how much they make, and the skills you’ll need to succeed in the role. While DevOps engineers don’t wear a software developer hat, familiarity with varying programming languages is beneficial, if not, often, required. Familiarity with several programming languages enables a DevOps engineer to more clearly identify opportunities to automate the development process. Popular languages, such as Python, Java, and JavaScript, are all good candidates for DevOps engineers to know.

  • Learn to design and deploy infrastructure as code, build and monitor CI/CD pipelines for different deployment strategies, and deploy scalable microservices using Kubernetes.
  • The role of DevOps engineer doesn’t fall along one career track; professionals evolve into the position from a variety of backgrounds.
  • Containerization platforms such as Docker and container orchestration tools like Kubernetes have revolutionized the way applications are deployed and managed in DevOps environments.
  • In preparation for the upcoming sprint, teams must workshop to explore, organize, and prioritize ideas.

The remedy was DevOps, which bridges the gap between these teams so they work cohesively. DevOps brings together the skills, processes, and tools together from both development and operations teams. Tens of thousands of developers use Chef to test, automate, and manage infrastructure. At the forefront of the DevOps evolution, the Seattle-based company has released products like Chef, InSpec, Habitat, and Chef Automate to advance new ways of developing and shipping software and applications. To experiment with and refine its own internal DevOps practices, Chef relies on the Atlassian platform. Automation is a critical part of an efficient DevOps lifecycle, decreasing hands-on work, and speeding testing, documentation and deployment.

How a DevOps engineer can help your team and company

DevOps engineers play a crucial role in bridging the gap between traditionally siloed departments to enable more consistency and effective collaboration. They often serve as the link between development teams and IT operations teams to help unify, optimize, and automate processes within the software development lifecycle. Because teams have different skillsets and goals, a DevOps engineer’s job is to balance the needs and goals of all teams and find solutions that enable everyone to do their best work. DevOps is a holistic business practice that combines people, technologies, cultural practices, and processes to bring previously siloed teams together to deliver better software faster. Successful DevOps implementations are viewed as an organizational change when it comes to software development.

DevOps engineers are usually part of a product team or designated DevOps team within a company, and may perform project management duties within their team. They frequently collaborate with software developers, software engineers, system operators and other IT professionals to accomplish their work. At the same time, developers may need support from DevOps engineers when working to improve the process of building and deploying application code. It reinforces the cycle of continuous deployment, feedback, and maintenance or incident response that teams need to keep always-on services, always on. The cultural benefits are more productive and efficient teams, and happier customers. On the business end, the benefits include greater collaboration and trust between team members, which results in faster delivery and stable operating environments.

Build

Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on. It offers excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and devops engineer training powerful workflows and tools for the development build process. In preparation for the upcoming sprint, teams must workshop to explore, organize, and prioritize ideas. Because of the continuous nature of DevOps, practitioners use the infinity loop to show how the phases of the DevOps lifecycle relate to each other.

This often means working more closely with developers to provide on-demand access to compliant, secure environments and tools. It also means turning to automation for more of their own repeatable tasks, such as updating systems and resolving incidents. Successful DevOps depends on cultural change—adopting a collaboration-first approach to software originally developed by open source teams. In open source, developers encourage transparency, shared workloads, continuous feedback and reviews, and robust documentation. Industry reports like DORA’s State of DevOps from researchers Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim, and popular DevOps frameworks like CALMS often use these best practices as benchmarks for a successful DevOps culture.

What is a DevOps engineer?

These platforms facilitate automated builds, testing, and code analysis, helping teams deliver high-quality software with greater speed and efficiency. Using automated security tools, developers find and address security vulnerabilities as they code instead of waiting for security teams to address them after deployment. DevOps managers are responsible for the implementation of the DevOps framework throughout the development and deployment process. This includes taking responsibility for successful software delivery, monitoring workflows, and overseeing software release management. Effective DevOps managers are leaders with excellent interpersonal and problem-solving skills, and a strong technical background. With version control and cloud-based development environments, developers can make ongoing changes and review code together in real time.

devops engineer meaning

Once a process is automated, it needs to be continually improved upon, as needs and requirements throughout the process change. DevOps engineers are called on to continuously look for opportunities to improve, streamline, and automate the development and deployment process. Additionally, DevOps engineers need to be able to work together with development and operations teams – as well as with other departments in the company – to continually improve collaboration and processes. Through short release cycles, the agile software development approach enables high adaptability to change.

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In fact, the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report found that elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams. Continuous delivery allows teams to build, test, and deliver software with automated tools. Continuous integration (CI) allows multiple developers to contribute to a single shared repository.

This often proves to be an antipattern because it makes security an afterthought, and it is much harder to secure software after it has been designed, built, and deployed than it is to design with security in mind. In most cases the title software developer is given to individuals who write either front-end or back-end application code, or both. These are the people who have been historically described as “computer programmers” before the rise of agile thinking.

The term ‘DevOps’ blends development and operations, much in the way that you form a bridge between the two worlds. DevOps engineers are responsible for infrastructure provisioning, infrastructure management, process automation, system administration, and security for an entire organization. A DevOps engineer is an IT professional that that manages an organization’s developer operations (DevOps), which includes all the practices and tools that the organization uses to create and manage software. A DevOps engineer optimizes an organization’s software delivery process to enable collaboration and innovation. Keep reading to learn more about what DevOps engineers do and what skills they rely on.

devops engineer meaning

Launching a startup allows DevOps engineers to pursue their creative vision, solve complex problems, and make a significant impact on the industry. These soft skills are critical in getting everyone on your DevOps team to work together. As a DevOps Engineer, you’ll need the ability to encourage a collaborative culture — even among people who are used to working solo. Continuous integration involves changes to code being built and tested then merged with the rest of the program using a shared repository like GitHub. A DevOps Engineer may be charged with overseeing these changes to avoid interrupting continuous integration.

Configuration Management Tools

A DevOps Engineer fosters a culture of communication, collaboration, and shared responsibility amongst all parties for the entire development lifecycle. DevOps Engineers use tools, processes, and development methods to ensure applications are developed efficiently. They play a vital role in each stage of the development process, from ideation to implementation and maintenance. The number of Software Engineers is predicted to explode at a rate of 25% between now and 2032. This demand for Software Engineers and the various applications they create has led to many new jobs and innovative, more efficient development processes — such as DevOps.

devops engineer meaning