Key skills you need for a successful DevOps career

Over the years and now with the pandemic, technology has revolutionized both the world and our daily lives. Technology changes with time, and every single day a new technology comes to the market. In this advanced tech world, it is the new buzz word. DevOps is the combination of Development teams and Operation teams aiming to utilize DevOps tools to alter and improve the relationship between development and IT operations, advocating for better communication and collaboration between the two units. These engineers are the ones who take care of the development, deployment, and management of applications and software. With the rise in use of technology, DevOps as a career will only boom.

DevOps has been gaining popularity at a rapid pace and the number of companies investing in DevOps has increased substantially. Enterprises — from Amazon and Facebook to Netflix and Walmart — are increasingly using DevOps to ensure rapid and consistent delivery of software and security updates to their own teams and to customers. The pandemic has got the small and medium businesses look at DevOps as well.

Even though companies are adopting a DevOps culture, hiring is still the number one challenge. Post the pandemic, technology will continue to play an important role especially DevOps and companies will hire experts in large numbers. Hence, now is the best time for you to acquire skills if you are eyeing a lucrative career in this domain.

Here are some crucial skills that every DevOps engineer should have to succeed:

1.     Skills and Knowledge about Various Infrastructure Automation Tools

One of the essential elements in the process of software development is automation. A majority of the manual tasks can be automated using the various scripting languages such as Ruby, Bash, Python, Node, Shell, etc. By automating workflows, you can speed up the development and deployment process and increase accuracy, while improving consistency and reliability while decreasing the number of errors.

2. ​Coding and Scripting Skills

DevOps engineers don’t need to be a coding guru. More than coding, scripting skills are very much recommended in the industry. To become the engineer, you should be aware of Linux fundamentals and possess knowledge on at least one scripting language. The scripting languages can include, but are not limited toPython, Ruby, Pearl, etc. They need to understand the code, develop scripts and tackle the integrations.

3.     Cloud Skills

Knowledge of the cloud has been relevant not only for DevOps but also for software developers. For many organizations, the cloud has been a major part of its culture. Cloud and DevOps have great potential to offer speed and agility to businesses. Cloud is so important in DevOps because it helps in orchestration and offers better control and coordination in the automation process. The cloud ensures that resources are easily monitored and the associated cost is efficiently tracked and adjusted.

4.     Knowledge of Source Control Systems

DevOps brings together people from different sectors. Therefore, source control systems or version control systems play a major role in any DevOps engineer life. Version control systems are used to track changes in the application. It also maintains different versions of the application and can affect its performance level by eliminating issues of dependency in different applications. It’s also vital to learn about various DevOps tools such as Git, Selenium, Docker, Puppet, Chef, Nagios, Jenkins, Ansible, Splunk, Ell Stack, and more.

5.     Software Security Skills

DevOps brings a faster cycle of development and deployment of code, which means that vulnerabilities are at higher risk of being introduced to the code much quicker than they have ever been able to before. The attacks may include XSS attacks, SQL attacks, and more. Therefore, engineers must have the skills to write secure code to protect applications from unwanted attacks from the start of deployment as opposed to adding it later. In addition,  ensuring systems have defence mechanisms in place against common cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

6.     Strong Communication and Collaboration Skills

Soft skills play a great role in the adoption of DevOps methodology. Communication and collaboration are important skills that can make or break DevOps in any organization. When developers communicate with each other effectively, applications can be delivered in a much short span of time and will lead to fewer errors,therefore lowering costs and improving the quality of code. Those interested in the field need to be able to listen attentively, negotiate, solve problems and build teams. Another important skill is integrity. It is the responsibility of DevOps engineers to bring people together from different IT sectors. So it is critical tomaintain the highest level of honesty and trust within team members.

7.     Knowledge about Containers

Container ecosystems have helped the popularity of DevOps immensely. Containers have introduced three concepts to DevOps culture; flow, feedback, continual experimentation, which are now considered to be the three pillars of it. Containers separate the software and give quick feedback from the customers and make testing much easier. In addition, it makes the application testing process a lot easier. To work in such an environment, you need to learn about container-related tools like Docker Engine, Docker Swarm, systemd-nspawn, LXC, container registries, etc.

8.     Familiarity with CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery)

CI is a DevOps methodology that continually merges source code updates from all developers on a specific software build, notifying the team of any failures in the process. It’s important to make sure that you know how to use CI tools such as VSTS, Bamboo, or Jenkins.

Apart from CI, you’ll need a deep understanding of CD theories, concepts and real-world application of them. You’ll not only need experience with CD tools and systems, but you’ll need intimate knowledge of their inner workings so you can integrate different tools and systems together in order to create fully functioning, cohesive delivery pipelines.

Kavita Viswanath, GM, JFrog

These skills are not difficult to acquire. You need to put in time and effort to learn these skills as DevOps offers a lot of lucrative career opportunities. So, what are you waiting for? Go and become a DevOps expert.