When a firm has a siloed structure where development and operations work independently, applying DevOps necessitates an organizational revamp. DevOps implementation requires the proper people, culture, and resources. However, a frequent obstacle to DevOps implementation is staff skill gaps.

A DevOps engineer has a critical role in DevOps restructure implementation. In addition to having a broad skill set encompassing both development and operations, this individual must have the interpersonal abilities to cross divisions across siloed teams.

What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is an IT generalist with an extensive understanding of both development and operations, such as coding, infrastructure management, system administration, and DevOps toolchains. Since DevOps engineers collaborate across organizational silos to foster a more collaborative atmosphere, they also need to have strong interpersonal skills. 

Besides having a firm grasp of standard system architecture, provisioning, and administration, DevOps engineers must be well-versed in agile principles and the conventional developer toolset and practices, such as using source control, submitting and receiving code reviews, and developing unit tests.

What are the Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer?

DevOps engineers play various roles in different organizations, but they always involve some mix of release engineering, system administration, security, infrastructure provisioning and management, and DevOps advocacy.

Release engineering encompasses the labor required to create and deliver application code. The precise tools and procedures differ greatly based on several factors, including the programming language used, the degree of automation in the pipeline, and whether the production infrastructure is located on-site or in the cloud. Writing custom build/deploy scripts and managing CI/CD tooling are two tasks that may fall under the purview of release engineering.

Infrastructure provisioning and system management entails deploying and managing the servers, storage, and networking resources needed to run applications. This could involve overseeing real servers, storage devices, switches, and virtualization software in a data center for businesses with on-premise resources. It usually includes provisioning and managing virtual instances of the same components for a hybrid or fully cloud-based company. 

Perhaps the most significant responsibility of a DevOps engineer is advocacy, which is frequently underappreciated or entirely disregarded. The engineering team members may experience disruption and confusion due to the shift to a DevOps culture. It is the responsibility of the DevOps engineer, as the subject matter expert in DevOps, to assist in evangelizing and teaching the DevOps way throughout the company.

Top DevOps Engineer Skills

The technical abilities required of a DevOps engineer will differ based on the team structure, technologies, and toolsets used. However, effective teamwork and communication abilities are crucial. Along with a thorough understanding of each element of a delivery pipeline, a DevOps engineer should also be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the various tools and services that are out there.

Communication and Collaboration

Effective communication and collaboration with teams, managers, and customers are critical skills for a DevOps engineer. While the quality and amount of feedback throughout the whole value stream is a significant factor in the success of DevOps, these so-called "soft skills" are frequently disregarded and underestimated.

System Administration

System administration tasks such as setting up and maintaining servers, deploying databases, keeping an eye on security, patching systems, and overseeing both internal and external network connectivity are all things that a DevOps engineer is familiar with.

Experience with DevOps Tools

The DevOps engineer needs to be knowledgeable about and proficient with a wide range of tools because employing the appropriate tools is crucial to DevOps techniques. These tools cover every stage of the DevOps lifecycle, from developing the infrastructure to maintaining and running a service or product.

Configuration Management

DevOps engineers are generally required to be familiar with one or more configuration management systems, such as Chef, Puppet, or Ansible. Many organizations use them and related solutions to automate system administration operations, like installing security fixes on existing systems or deploying new ones.

Containers and Container Orchestration

Containerization is a technology made famous by Docker that combines the application's code and execution environment into the same image. As a result, there is less need for conventional configuration management solutions. While managing containers has its own set of difficulties, a DevOps engineer's familiarity with the class of tools known as "container orchestrators"—such as Docker Swarm or Kubernetes—becomes essential.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are essential techniques of a DevOps approach to software development, made possible by numerous accessible tools. Automating the software development, testing, and deployment process is the primary purpose of any CI/CD solution or tool suite.

DevOps engineers typically require experience configuring and implementing one or more CI/CD solutions and the ability to collaborate closely with the rest of the development team to ensure efficient utilization of these tools.

System Architecture and Provisioning

Whether on-premises or in the cloud, a DevOps engineer should be able to build, deploy, and maintain computer ecosystems. It's critical to comprehend Infrastructure as Code (IaC), an IT management methodology that integrates best practices from DevOps software development with cloud infrastructure resource management. A DevOps engineer should be able to use Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) to model system infrastructure in the cloud.

Familiarity with Scripting and Coding

Writing shell scripts to automate tedious operations is a skill that many conventional system administrators possess. Beyond building automation scripts, a DevOps engineer should know about advanced software development techniques and how to apply agile development techniques like source control and code reviews. 

Collaborative Management Skills

No matter the exact organizational structure, cross-team collaboration is a critical element of a successful DevOps approach. Whether the engineering team is divided solely by responsibilities or there are separate teams for feature development, quality assurance, DevOps, and so on, the DevOps engineer should operate as a coach and coworker with a wide range of people throughout the organization.

Other Roles and Responsibilities

DevOps Evangelist

This DevOps specialist encourages and advances DevOps procedures throughout the company. Although the work of the DevOps evangelist mostly focuses on process improvement and human communication, they usually possess a robust technical background.

Automation Expert

Automation knowledge is a must for each DevOps engineer. Nonetheless, it is not unusual for a company to have a dedicated position for an automation engineer or specialist. This person might be responsible for developing and maintaining automated test suites or managing the CI/CD tooling.

Software Developer

In most cases, the term "software developer" refers to those who write front-end or back-end application code or both. Before agile thinking gained popularity, these individuals were historically known as "computer programmers."

Quality Assurance

Finding software bugs is the responsibility of the quality assurance (QA) team. Historically, QA engineers concentrated on manually evaluating newly written application code to make sure it doesn't blow up right away ("smoke testing"), break current functionality (also known as "regression testing"), or conflict with any other new features ("integration testing"). 

Organizations are increasingly using software development engineers in test (SDET) roles to augment or replace manual testers.

Security Engineer

Organizations that have not entirely integrated security and compliance concerns into their planning and development processes will frequently have a security officer or team in place. It is often an antipattern because it reduces security to an afterthought, and it is much more challenging to protect software after it has been planned, created, and deployed than it is to design for security.

Wrapping Up!

DevOps necessitates a cultural shift, new management concepts, and the application of technological tools. The core of a DevOps transformation is a DevOps engineer who needs a wide range of abilities to support this shift. To execute DevOps and enhance the software development lifecycle, most firms will require a combination of generalists and experts rather than simply one DevOps engineer. A DevOps engineer aids in the dismantling of organizational silos to promote cooperation across various specialists and toolchains to fully realize the potential of DevOps.

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