DevOps Engineer: Basic Features

By Mitch Rice

One can easily find the guidelines for successful growth from Middle developer to DevOps engineer on the web. Still, it is crucial to understand what this specialist does: their primary professional skills, responsibilities, etc. This IT area emerged due to ongoing conflicts between developers and sysadmins. While the developer is trying to deliver a new project faster, the sysadmin stabilizes the process and streamlines them by all means. Thus, a DevOps engineer’s task is to synchronize absolutely all the operations concerning a particular project.

What is DevOps?

DevOps refers to a certain methodology that aims to automate all the work processes over a project, thus making them seamless. It ends up affecting both the speed of developers and their productivity. The changes also apply to testers’ and system administrators’ duties.

DevOps engineer tasks and responsibilities:

  • Developing the architecture of future programs. It is this specialist who deals with coming up with the scaling as well as the orchestration system.
  • Automating code checking and server configuration. It is the second phase of the DevOps engineer’s work on the project.
  • Development of an automated testing system (finished products). 
  • Analysis of user surveys after product release. Seamless implementation of updates and application improvements.
  • Solving problems that arise between other professionals working on the project. 

What should a DevOps engineer know?

Popular IT recruiting websites to highlight the basic knowledge that DevOps engineers should have. Any expert in this field always has a broad outlook. He needs to understand several areas at once. Among them, it is worth highlighting the following:

  • Development. Any engineer needs to know several programming languages at once. It allows them to read codes, write software quickly and do automation.
  • Operating systems. If a specialist is good, he needs to know different types of operating systems and understand them. Only in this way can he choose which of them to run the project. In addition, the operating system type also determines the tools to be used.
  • Cloud. Such technologies have been developing rapidly lately. That is why DevOps-engineers need to know all the tools by which they can automate the processes for testing the written code and building applications.
  • Orchestration systems. It’s about how containers function and how to orchestrate systems.

A DevOps engineer can work for almost any company that does what application development does. Most often, we are talking about large organizations rather than small firms.

Advantages of the profession

If you are a software developer, you most likely know your responsibilities as a specialist. That is because such an expert deals with a very narrow list of tasks. As for the DevOps-engineer, however, the case here is somewhat different. He has to perform tasks that directly depend on what kind of product you are creating.

Among the main advantages of the profession of DevOps-engineer, it is worth allocating first of the following:

  • High salary. It is sometimes even higher than that of ordinary developers. 
  • Demand on the market. You can find a job in this field almost at any time. The main thing is to understand where to do it. The experts recommend choosing the recruiting agencies.
  • Opportunity to use professional skills in other areas. You can always change your specialization since you know several programming languages.

Even though companies that hire DevOps engineers are outsourcing software development services, this profession involves performing professional tasks on-site. For this reason, it is pretty rare to talk about remote employment.

Data and information are provided for informational purposes only, and are not intended for investment, medical or other purposes.