Exploring DevOps: Understanding the Field and Assessing Its Potential as a Career Path
DevOps expertly integrates and improves collaboration and communication between the development and IT operation teams, ensuring a seamless workspace between all parties involved in the software development life cycle. DevOps engineers are central to this innovative practice, enabling engineers to create seamless and innovative delivery and deployment pipelines. Should you become a DevOps engineer? What is the DevOps skills list? DevOps takes your career further if you already have expertise in software development. Let’s explore DevOps as a field its potential as a career path, and the DevOps engineer skills needed to excel in this exciting field.
Evolution of DevOps
Before DevOps, development teams and IT operations worked independently, with as little collaboration as necessary. The development team was responsible for writing codes, while the IT operations team focused on deploying and maintaining software in real-world circumstances. The lack of collaboration fostered disunity, operational inefficiency, and time-wasting, leading organizations to spend more on software development and run into avoidable issues.
But that’s no longer the case. DevOps engineers bridge the gap between development and operation, ensuring feedback is quickly generated from rigorous testing, streamlined operation, and efficient Software delivery pipelines.
Today, companies are adapting to an agile, automated, and collaborative approach to software development. They ensure that operations and developers communicate, test software methodologies and code architecture for correctness, resolve errors, and foster common and shared responsibilities for the success of a software development project.
DevOps Engineer Skills Needed: Core Principles of DevOps:
Collaboration: DevOps encourages cross-functional teams where developers, operations engineers, quality assurance professionals, and other stakeholders work together throughout the software development lifecycle. Collaboration is key to ensuring that all aspects of software delivery, from development to deployment to monitoring, are aligned toward common goals.
Automation: CI/CD pipelines are components that drive automation with DevOps. Automation is a system where redundant tasks like code testing, infrastructure provisioning, and build processes can be done without manual intervention, reducing human error and increasing efficiency. CI/CD is one of the key skills for DevOps engineers.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Continuous Integration and deployment are two vital methodologies in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Continuous Integration involves making changes to pockets of code, testing the changes, and integrating the code with the larger code ecosystem. In contrast, Continuous Deployment involves automating delivery pipelines through methodologies like automated system upgrades.
Monitoring and Feedback: DevOps methodologies include real-time monitoring of software programs and their architecture to detect and respond to issues immediately. Monitoring, feedback, insights, and correction are all the factors that make DevOps valuable to the software development industry. The ability to automate monitoring methodologies is one of the top skills for DevOps engineers.
What Organizations Stand to Gain with DevOps
When assessing the value of a skillset or service to your career, you must first consider whether the service is in demand and how much people are willing to pay for it. Let’s explore what you (as a DevOps engineer) will bring and what organizations will gain from using your services.
Faster time to market: This is perhaps one of the most important factors organizations consider when developing software. By integrating the development and IT operations teams, improved software delivery pipelines, and streamlined update releases, software will get to the market quickly. Also, maintenance of DevOps-backed software is more affordable, seamless, and better than maintenance of non-DevOps-backed software.
Lesser software downtime: DevOps-backed systems will have lesser downtime because pockets of codes can be checked independently for correctness and bugs, fixed, and deployed in real-time (that is, the remaining framework will work perfectly while a part of the code structure is being checked). Testing is also automated. This means that code architecture will be tested with little or no human intervention, improving efficiency and reducing errors and waste. Lastly, deployment is also automated. DevOps systems are incredibly automated and driven by high-tech tools and solutions; hence, they are excellent for scalable software.
Reliability and Stability: Methodologies like CI/CD, automated testing, and IaC ensure that software is reliable, stable, and scalable.
Cost Reduction: By optimizing processes, automating manual tasks, and improving resource utilization, DevOps can lead to cost savings for organizations through increased efficiency and reduced downtime.
Increased Collaboration and Communication: DevOps fosters collaboration and communication among all SDLC stakeholders.
Five Reasons Why You Should Become a DevOps Engineer
- DevOps is in demand, so you’ll have the opportunity to work with global companies looking to streamline their Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
- Pay: DevOps will open your career to better opportunities, including more robust paydays.
- Work with a global team: You will have the opportunity to work with global teams, especially mid-level to large organizations that depend on software programs to supply services. You can attract global clients with a certification in the DevOps engineer skills list.
DevOps is beyond a trend, so you need to understand the DevOps engineer skills required to excel in the field. DevOps is an essential part of the Software Development Life Cycle, and many forward-thinking large companies depend on DevOps engineers, among other experts like QA automation engineers, cloud-native engineers, and artificial intelligence experts, for a more robust and integrated development team.
Conclusion
DevOps represents a fundamental shift in how organizations approach software development and IT operations, emphasizing collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. With DevOps, organizations can quickly adopt innovations, create software programs, test, automate insight generation, and use data-backed tools to determine software viability. DevOps isn’t just an SDLC tool; it’s a methodology that distinguishes elite software development from mediocre software development. Becoming a DevOps engineer positions you as a cornerstone of SDLC and a valuable and in-demand professional; hence, you must understand the DevOps engineer skills needed to excel in this exciting profession.
Author: Gregory Swenson
Gregory is an experienced IT professional with a knack for solving complex tech challenges. With over a decade in software development and technology consulting, he shares his insights and expertise through articles to help others navigate the IT landscape.