DevOps engineers are the grease that keeps the wheels of software development spinning smoothly. They break down barriers between teams to help companies build and release software faster and more reliably. We like to think of them as the glue that binds developers, IT ops, and even customers together toward a shared purpose.
DevOps starts with a mindset focused on speed, quality, and collaboration. It’s about empowering people and teams through trust and automation. Technology comes last. You can have all the tools in the world without delivering value if your culture isn’t truly embracing Agile principles.
The Rise of DevOps
Not too long ago, dev and ops teams might as well have worked for different companies. Devs would toss code over the wall to IT, then wipe their hands and move on. If things broke in production, ops scrambled to fix it without much insight into the root causes. It was like playing a game of hot potato, with each team blaming the other when users were dissatisfied.
Around 2009, forward-thinking internet companies like Flickr, Facebook and Netflix pioneered the DevOps methodology to fix this fractured culture. They recognized that developers and IT operators had to work shoulder-to-shoulder, using automation to smooth away friction that delayed releases. It just made sense – better collaboration meant better software and happier customers.
What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
A DevOps engineer is an individual who implements the concepts of DevOps engineering services in organizations. They employ specific tools and processes for collaborating with teams that write, debug, and deploy code and teams that manage the underlying infrastructure.
Here are some of the key duties and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer:
Automating Infrastructure Provisioning
DevOps engineers ensure that infrastructure resources like servers, storage, networks, and cloud services are provisioned and configured automatically. Tasks include:
- Setting up and administering networks as code by utilizing templating tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or Terraform
- Creating CI/CD pipelines
- Taking advantage of technologies such as Containers and especially Docker and Kubernetes
- The optimization of microservices and APIs as the primary tools for creating applications.
Such automation assists in maintaining order and efficiency as changes readily move from development to production. It also helps in the scaling of the infrastructure whenever the workloads of the applications change or grow.
Collaborating with Development Teams
DevOps engineers collaborate closely with software developers to ensure code deployments are seamless and stable. Responsibilities include:
- Consulting on best practices for develop-to-deploy workflows
- Identifying opportunities to integrate security controls and compliance requirements
- Providing feedback to help develop robust and scalable systems
- Assisting with API documentation and microservices implementation
They provide guidance, tools and platforms that enable developers to follow infrastructure-as-code principles for building, testing and releasing their applications.
Monitoring Systems and Services
DevOps engineers are responsible for monitoring all systems and services to detect problems quickly. Tasks include:
- Setting up logging and metrics collection
- Establishing alert thresholds and notifications
- Correlating monitoring data with business KPIs
- Performing root cause analysis for incidents
- Producing audit reports for compliance
Strong monitoring and observability practices allow them to troubleshoot issues and outages rapidly. This minimizes downtime and service disruptions when problems occur.
Improving Reliability and Uptime
A major goal for DevOps engineers is optimizing reliability and uptime for applications and infrastructure. Their duties include:
- Performing capability and resiliency testing
- Building runbooks and playbooks for recovery procedures
- Conducting failure mode analysis and fault tree analysis
- Architecting redundancy, failover and disaster recovery
- Managing technical debt with refactoring and code remediation
These practices allow systems to withstand real-world load and continue functioning during outages or degradations.
Promoting Culture Change
Beyond deploying technology, DevOps engineers nurture cultural transformation in organizations. They champion practices like:
- Encouraging developers to own production operations
- Fostering collaboration between teams and breaking down silos
- Facilitating security and compliance controls earlier in sprints
- Shortening feedback loops with telemetry and monitoring-driven development
They act as change agents to reshape mindsets, processes, and workflows to deliver software faster and more reliably.
Key DevOps Engineer Skills
DevOps engineers require a diverse set of both hard and soft skills. Technical aptitude is crucial for working across a range of infrastructure, orchestration, automation and monitoring tools. Equally important is the ability to influence behavioral change for adopting DevOps principles. Most DevOps engineers have six to ten years of experience.
Here are some of the most essential skills for DevOps engineers:
- Cloud platforms – Expertise with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform for provisioning infrastructure-as-code and managing container orchestration.
- Infrastructure as code – Applying configuration as code practices using Ansible, Terraform, Chef, and Puppet to declare the desired system state.
- CI/CD pipelines – Designing automated build, test and release pipelines with Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI, GitLab, and Argo CD.
- Monitoring and observability – Leveraging monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus and Grafana to provide visibility into systems.
- Container orchestration – Utilizing Docker swarm or Kubernetes for packaging, deploying and managing containers.
- Coding and scripting – Programming experience with languages like JavaScript/Node.js, GoLang, Python, and Ruby to automate operational tasks.
- Collaboration – Partnering with development and product teams throughout the software lifecycle.
- Communication – Clearly conveying technical concepts to senior leadership as well as engineers.
- Troubleshooting – Identifying root causes of failures and devising solutions.
- Security mindset – Incorporating security practices into all processes and configurations.
DevOps Engineer vs SysAdmin & SRE
The advent of DevOps has led to some overlap with traditional systems administrator and site reliability engineering roles. Here are some key differences:
Systems administrators focus on the day-to-day maintenance and support of infrastructure components. DevOps engineers build tooling and systems to automate IT operations.
Site reliability engineers (SREs) emphasize establishing and meeting reliability goals for services and platforms. DevOps engineers focus more holistically on culture, practices and tools across the entire software delivery lifecycle.
DevOps engineers oversee the end-to-end process from code development to deployment and operations. Their goal is to implement DevOps methodology rather than just maintain infrastructure or meet numeric targets.
There can be significant overlap between these roles. However, the orientation of a DevOps engineer centers firmly on fostering cross-functional collaboration through the whole develop-to-deploy pipeline.
Transitioning to a DevOps Engineer Role
DevOps offers an exciting career path for developers, sysadmins and other IT professionals looking to advance their skills. Here are some tips for becoming a DevOps engineer:
- Gain exposure to infrastructure automation and configuration management tools like Ansible, Terraform and Docker.
- Understand CI/CD concepts with platforms like Jenkins, CircleCI and GitLab.
- Get hands-on experience provisioning cloud infrastructure on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
- Learn a scripting language like Python that is widely used for DevOps automation.
- Explore monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic and Grafana.
- Focus on enhancing visibility, collaboration and communication between teams.
- Highlight process improvement and automation efforts in your resume.
- Consider DevOps certifications from AWS, Google Cloud and Red Hat.
The increased demand for DevOps skills presents many possibilities for specialized and rewarding work optimizing the software development lifecycle.
DevOps for Organizational Success
Adopting DevOps principles and hiring DevOps engineers offers significant benefits for companies building software products and platforms. Research indicates organizations that embrace DevOps practices are:
- 24x more likely to achieve their goals for rapid software delivery
- 3x more likely to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals
- 2x as likely to exceed customer satisfaction and quality metrics
By breaking down barriers between teams and optimizing develop-to-deploy toolchains, DevOps enables businesses to achieve their targets for innovation, revenue and customer loyalty.
Conclusion
DevOps engineers play a critical role in modern IT environments. They combine software development, infrastructure automation and IT operations skills to help organizations ship better software faster. Leveraging configuration management, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, monitoring and collaboration practices, DevOps engineers increase productivity and reliability across the whole development lifecycle. They exemplify how bringing disparate teams together in a culture of shared purpose and automation can profoundly improve business outcomes. The growing field of DevOps offers exciting career opportunities for technology leaders ready to guide transformational change.