DevOps is a collaborative approach just taken up by most companies these days. It focuses on scaling up and making the entire process of scaling up much smoother. So no doubt companies are actively looking out for DevOps engineers.
Welcome to another tutorial with Sefisoft. And today we’ll be looking into how you can become a DevOps engineer. So let’s begin.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a collaboration between the development and the operations team, which enables continuous delivery of application and services to the end users. So let’s expand on this definition. First, the development team is the one that actually produces the products the operation teams is related with the management or the maintenance of these products.
Now, there’s a link that DevOps forms between these two teams, which makes this entire process much smoother. And this approach this collaborative approach is what’s called DevOps.
So DevOps focuses on continuous delivery of application, which means that when the development team is ready with the product, it immediately goes into the maintenance or the management phase. And it’s then pushed on to the end users with minimum delay, just in case you doubt the stand of DevOps today, or its growth in the near future, you must know that according to the information week, DevOps will be in high demand for upcoming years and has no chance of slowing down.
Also, according to LinkedIn, over the past few years, it has increased in demand by 50%. Now, that’s quite a lot of growth. So clearly, DevOps is a field that will be great to dive into and grow in.
So before we begin, how you can actually become a DevOps engineer. Let’s look at what we’ll be going through in this Article.
First, we’ll look at who is a DevOps engineer followed by the DevOps career roadmap, we’ll then look into a DevOps certification, and then finally the salary transfer a DevOps engineer.
who is a DevOps engineer?
A DevOps engineer is an IT professional who understands the software development lifecycle. And when I say software development lifecycle, I did not just mean the DevOps approach, but right from our waterfall model, which is a traditional software development lifecycle.
And then as you know, we moved on to the agile and finally, we reached the DevOps lifecycle. So a DevOps engineer needs to understand the whole purpose of this life cycle, why we had to move from one model to the other, what are the shortcomings of the previous models had? And what all does DevOps make up for?
Also, other than understanding this entire process, they also need to know how to use the various automation tools for developing the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines.
a DevOps is engineer is expected to collaborate with the developers and the operations team to deliver high quality products within a minimum amount of time. Now, DevOps engineer as such is not a profile that you might come across very often.
But of course, there are a number of career paths that you can take under the DevOps engineer. But of course, there are a number of career paths under a DevOps engineer. Some of these are the
- DevOps architect
- automation engineer
- software tester
- integration specialist
- security engineer
- release manager
DevOps career roadmap
Now let’s look at the DevOps career roadmap. So basically, if you are looking forward to bagging that DevOps engineer job, where should you start and how should you go about it?
First thing first, there are a few programming languages, which go hand in hand with the DevOps tools, you need to pick up these and also know the Linux fundamentals.
DevOps uses these programming languages for developing and automating software. Now the three most common languages used with the DevOps tools are
- Ruby
- Python
- JavaScript.
It is always advised that you know, at least one of these of course, we must consider the fact that these three languages are used with completely different tools.
So knowing just one of these languages does not mean that you can now work with any tool under the DevOps approach, but it does give you a good hang of at least one of them, which is more than most insane.
It’s also important to know the fundamentals of the Linux command line interface. Of course, this is not very unique to DevOps, whichever career path you are choosing Linux fundamentals is one of the most important things.
let’s now discuss some of the mandatory Linux skills that DevOps engineers should be aware of.
The first is of course, the Linux shell. Now you must either know bash or the kernel shell, then linux commands. Now there are a huge number of Linux commands, but the basic ones you must know no matter what are defined, grep awk, and the said command and finally,
we have the networking Command ns lookup, which is for querying the DNS, and netstat, for monitoring your connections,
1. source code management.
our next milestone would be learning the source code management now, so it’s good management is especially important when you’re dealing with huge projects. So that all your codes irrespective of the number of files you have, or the number of versions of a particular code you have,
everything is organized and can be easily accessible. So it’s important that you’re comfortable with at least one of these source code management tools. Here, the most common ones we see are get CVS and Mercurial.
I would personally recommend you to choose Git and why Git because Git is used to track changes in the source code, it can manage large project efficiently and it allows multiple developers to work together with great ease.
2. build applications.
Now our next stage is to learn to build applications. So a DevOps engineer must know how to build an application and commit to the source code managment tools such as kit now popular tool used to build applications which makes things much simpler is Maven , why Maven Well, it supports parallel builds instant access to new features without any additional configuration and has an easy build process.
Now Maven is actually an automation tool which helps to build and manage software projects within a short period of time.
3. learning to automate the process using ci and CD tools.
One of the most extensively used tools in this field is Jenkins Jenkins is an open source continuous integration tool. It helps to automate continuous development Testing and deployment of newly created codes.
Well why Jenkins because it has multiple plugins. It is easily distributed across multiple machines and has an easy installation and configuration process.
4. learn to test the applications.
Our next stage is to learn to test the applications. Once you have completed the build process, learn how to automate the testing process of web applications. One of the best testing tools for QA teams is Selenium and , why Selenium
above all the other tools that provide the same functionality? Well because it provides fast execution allows scripting in several languages, and also supports parallel test execution.
5. learn to deploy applications in production servers
The next thing is to learn to deploy applications in production servers, so you should learn how to deploy and run the applications in the production servers. And in order to deploy an application.
you should have the knowledge of containers such as Docker and configuration management tools like Ansible so Docker helps with the containers.
While configuration management tools such as Ansible so Docker has its containerization with wild tools such as Ansible helps you to provide you the capability of pushing configurations onto multiple servers and maintaining them in the required state.
So why choose Docker high scalability and efficiency reusable data volumes, isolated applications and why Ansible because unlike other tools in this field, it has a push based configuration. It is agentless and uses SSH for secure connections.
6. learn to monitor the applications
The next stage is to learn to monitor the applications. So monitoring your applications is another important aspect of a Devops engineer. In this stage, we identify the issue and implement the changes as quickly as possible.
The most popular tool which provides for monitoring applications is Nagios. It has a comprehensive monitoring system, high availability and immediate remediation.
And finally, a DevOps engineer must know the working of cloud providers For a DevOps engineer, it’s important to know about the cloud service providers and their basics
cloud computing is an important skill to learn irrespective of which failure into them. As a lot of companies have the infrastructure on the cloud. Amazon Web Services is the most popular cloud provider whereas Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are slowly catching up to Amazon.
Amazon Web Services provides high scalability and flexibility is cost effective and provides better security.
DevOps certifications
Let’s now look at some of the DevOps certifications you can opt for. The first one is the AWS certified DevOps engineer program, which is offered by Amazon Web Services.
DevOps engineer Salary
If you are taking up a career, you must know what kind of salary to expect an average salary of a DevOps engineer in the United States is $155,666 per year.
