What Does a DevOps Engineer Do? A Career Guide

Examples of configuration management tools include Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack. These tools provide declarative or imperative approaches to infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing teams to define and enforce desired state configurations consistently across environments. A continuous learning and continuous improvement mindset is essential across all roles in software engineering, but its importance is amplified for a DevOps engineer. A DevOps engineer must continually learn about new technologies, tools, and best practices and implement the ones best suited to the project. A DevOps engineer’s end goal is to shorten the software development process, increase the frequency of software releases, unite operations teams and development teams, and facilitate more dependable releases.

The following section presents a complete roadmap on how you can learn these skills and become a DevOps engineer. For instance, a single application could be composed of a frontend, backend, database, file server, etc., each residing on a separate server. For a seamless user experience, these separate entities should be able to communicate smoothly. As cloud development continues to grow and more companies migrate to the cloud, the future of DevOps looks good. In the last few years, many companies have instituted DevOps practices and many more are planning to do so.

Choose The Right DevOps Program For You

Developing strong communication and collaboration skills can help you build effective relationships and drive successful project outcomes. DevOps engineers may be expected to participate in core development processes in some scenarios. Particularly in small teams and startups, DevOps works closely with software engineers on one end and the production team on the other, supporting both in their tasks. They need to use open source technologies and innovations to augment the codebase and accelerate product or feature release for the organization. This program is most suitable for learners aspiring for the role and responsibilities of senior DevOps engineers and above. Collaboration and communication platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Jira facilitate real-time communication, collaboration, and project management within DevOps teams.

devops engineer roles and responsibilities

Knowledge of networks comes in handy when setting up resources in the public cloud. At a minimum, you should clearly understand standard protocols(TCP/IP, UDP), routing, IP addressing, subnetting, and ports. This tutorial will help you learn Git basics and how to use Git for collaboration using Bitbucket, a code hosting platform. Once you go through the tutorial, you can easily switch from Bitbucket to GitHub and GitLab, which are more popular among developers. Many of these guides lack structure and organization, resulting in a dilemma of where to start.

The DevOps team: other roles and responsibilities

A DevOps engineer helps to break down silos to facilitate collaboration among different experts and across toolchains to realize the full promise of DevOps. Release engineering includes the work required to build and deploy application code. Release engineering might entail selecting, provisioning, and maintaining CI/CD tooling or writing and maintaining bespoke build/deploy scripts. This role is crucial in bridging the gap between development and operations teams, ensuring seamless collaboration and efficient delivery of high-quality software products. As a result, DevOps engineers are among the most in-demand technical roles in the market today.

  • Engineers typically use Infrastructure as Code solutions to speed up setup times and ensure more infrastructure flexibility.
  • This enables continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, and the delivery of high-quality, well-tested code.
  • Below are the primary responsibilities of a well-rounded, efficient DevOps team.
  • While minor problems can be quickly fixed by the software engineer or the operations team, more severe issues have to be analyzed by a DevOps engineer before initiating a fix.
  • If you want to take on DevOps engineer responsibilities, it may be a good idea to get familiar with some deployment tools that help with continuous delivery and custom automation scripts.
  • A cloud engineer, site reliability engineer, automation engineer, or security engineer is one of your specializations.

They must thoroughly understand basic programming languages, such as Java, Python, JavaScript, PHP, Shell, Node.js, Bash, Ruby, and more. They must also have experience in Linux as the developers continue to use it even to this day. With experience and expertise, DevOps engineers can transition into leadership roles such as DevOps team lead, DevOps manager, or DevOps architect. These roles involve overseeing and orchestrating DevOps initiatives, driving strategic decision-making, and shaping the organization’s DevOps culture and practices.

What Skills Are Needed to Be a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is an IT generalist who should have a wide-ranging knowledge of both development and operations, including coding, infrastructure management, system administration, and DevOps toolchains. DevOps engineers should also possess interpersonal skills since they work across company silos to create a more collaborative environment. DevOps engineers often work with diverse teams, including developers, operations engineers, quality assurance specialists, and business stakeholders.

The instructor-led DevOps course at Scaler consists of live instruction, practical experience in a real-world cloud setting, one-on-one mentoring, and career assistance. The course covers a wide range of topics, including Linux, Python, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, and DevOps tools. Scaler’s DevOps course is designed to help students develop the skills they need to get jobs as DevOps engineers, SREs, or cloud engineers. CM tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet automate the provisioning and configuration of servers and infrastructure. They ensure that systems are configured consistently and reliably, reducing the risk of human error and enabling faster and more efficient deployments. They track changes to code, allowing multiple developers to work on the same project simultaneously without overwriting each other’s work.

What does a DevOps Engineer do?

DevOps breaks down these silos, promoting collaboration and shared responsibility throughout the software lifecycle. The composition of a DevOps team can vary depending on the size and complexity of the organization. However, these key roles typically work together seamlessly, fostering a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement to achieve the goals of faster, more reliable software delivery.

devops engineer roles and responsibilities

Microservices also improve team productivity and fit into cloud-based application architectures by increasing their availability. Serverless computing is another vital skill as it allows DevOps engineers to deploy code with minimal infrastructure dependencies or configuration hassles. The DevOps pipeline relies on infrastructure automation to smoothly get the code into production and on time. To achieve this, engineers must leverage infrastructure as code (IaC) to automate tasks like provisioning and configuration.

This guide explores the diverse responsibilities and essential skills that define this critical role in modern software development. They allow organizations to adopt the DevOps methodology for software development lifecycle (SDLC) management. They help developer and operations teams to work side by side to enable a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow instead devops engineer training of working in silos. The DevOps Training and knowledge of specific tools such as Git, Docker, and Jenkins is a big advantage to bridge the gaps, and get a step closer to becoming a DevOps Engineer. As organizations continue to embrace DevOps practices to streamline software delivery and improve operational efficiency, the demand for skilled DevOps engineers has surged exponentially.

devops engineer roles and responsibilities

Atlassian’s Open DevOps provides everything teams need to develop and operate software. Teams can build the DevOps toolchain they want, thanks to integrations with leading vendors and marketplace apps. Because we believe teams should work the way they want, rather than the way vendors want.

They are the orchestrators of the software delivery pipeline, ensuring that code is developed, tested, and deployed efficiently and reliably. Consider them to be the symphony conductors, bringing the various components of the software development lifecycle into harmony. DevOps Engineers are IT professionals who work with production IT staff, including software developers and system operators in various companies. And Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important concept, since it can prevent common deployment problems by enabling applications to be tested in production-like environments early in the development process. Additionally, DevOps engineers should be able to design and manage infrastructures that are located on-premise, as well as those in the cloud. Organizations rely on their DevOps engineers for guidance and leadership across their entire app development lifecycle.

devops engineer roles and responsibilities