The term “DevOps” sounds quite exciting or like a secret operation of some sort but it’s the polar opposite. DevOps is a combination of the terms “development” and “operations.” It represents an inclusive, highly collaborative method for application development and IT projects which includes everyone from engineers and dev teams to project managers and designers.
In broad terms, DevOps is technically a philosophy or methodology among teams to promote better communication and teamwork within dev teams and beyond. It relies on the adoption of iterative development alongside automated, programmable infrastructure for deployment and maintenance. It effectively helps companies reinvent the software delivery chain, job roles, IT tools, and general best practices.
Outside of technical benefits, DevOps also helps to build better work cultures and relationships. For example, working across teams and with a broader group of employees help build trust and cohesion across team members. As the relationships between developers, system administrators, and business decision-makers aren’t always a priority, DevOps makes them an integral part of the working process.
Hiring Guide
In short, a DevOps engineer is an experienced developer who has a firm grasp of the steps of the general Software Development Life Cycle, understands different automation testing tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, and can successfully manage a DevOps team. This makes them incredibly in-demand in the current tech landscape with the need only continuing to grow.
It’s worth noting, though, that the “DevOps Engineer” or just using DevOps as a job title is somewhat of a farce as there is no step-by-step guide to follow to take on this career path. Whether or not an engineer should apply for a DevOps role within a company depends mostly on their skills and experience.
A DevOps approach helps developers execute IT projects to help meet business needs but coexists with other procedures or methodologies. For example, many DevOps engineers work in Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, and many other strategies. Developers in these roles must build a continuous delivery and continuous integration pipeline while ensuring all aspects of the process work synchronously together.
In their day-to-day roles, DevOps experts look at individual functions of the project environment while writing code with an emphasis on scalability. This means that they must have the skills to write code in several languages. Skills and experience in testing and strategic planning are also must-have abilities for successful DevOps professionals.
All of the smaller skills required for a good developer mixed with professional soft skills such as communication, processing skills and knowledge, business skills, automation capabilities, and so on make up the larger picture of a hireable and successful DevOps developer. The best DevOps engineers resist the stereotypical organizational silos and embrace cross-team constant collaboration to ensure everyone’s success.
Interview Questions
What is configuration management and why is it important in DevOps?
Configuration management is the practice of handling changes to ensure that systems don’t lose their integrity over time. This involves the enforcement of certain policies, techniques, procedures, and tools used for the evaluation and changing of proposals, their management, and tracking of progress alongside the maintenance of necessary documentation.
Configuration management helps provide both technical and administrative directions about the design and development of the project at hand. At the same time, it helps in the automation of tedious and time-consuming tasks to enhance an organization’s agility and overall efficiency. It helps improve the product development process by bringing consistency through the means of control, streamlining, extensive documentation, and change implementation management.
How does DevOps differ from the Agile Methodology?
Agile is specifically a software development methodology used to focus on the incremental, iterative, and rapid release of software parts or features through the involvement of the customer through constant feedback. It helps to bridge the gap between the client and the development team.
DevOps does typically follow the Agile methodology, but it’s much more than that. DevOps is a practice or work culture focusing on the collaboration of the development and operations teams to create one unified workforce for successful product development and release. It makes a practice of continuous development, integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring of the Software Development Life Cycle.
What’s the difference between continuous development and continuous delivery?
Continuous deployment is when the production environment is fully automated and doesn’t require any manual or human intervention. The processes are run by an automated set of instructions and require no approvals. Continuous delivery requires some manual intervention and typically requires a supervisor’s approval before deployment into production. The working of the application also depends on the team’s decisions.
Job Description
We are currently looking for an experienced DevOps developer to join our team to help improve customer experiences via the building of functional systems. The ideal candidate will work on ways to automate and improve the development lifecycle as well as product releases while making communication a top priority. They will manage the design, development, testing, and deployment of products to help meet client needs.
Responsibilities
- Deploy and maintain critical applications
- Implement effective monitoring, automation, and infrastructure-as-code solutions
- Maintain and deploy continuous integration and deployment pipelines across development environments
- Build and set up new development tools and infrastructure
- Design procedures for maintenance and system troubleshooting
- Work with software developers and engineers to ensure the following of established processes and procedures
Skills and Qualifications
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar discipline
- 5+ years of experience in DevOps engineering
- Working knowledge of databases
- Incredible problem-solving abilities
- Collaborative and communication-based work style
- Good knowledge of various programming languages
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.
