Companies are moving to DevOps as it can help them streamline software development and stay ahead of their competition.
This trend has led to a raised demand for DevOps engineers, qualified professionals with the necessary skills to make DevOps work.
As a result, many technology lovers are considering a career as a DevOps engineer as they see it as a lucrative career path and know the increasing importance of DevOps in delivering applications.
If you’re interested in this profession, the information here will be helpful to you.
Let’s check it out!
Job Description
What Is DevOps?
It is considered a combination of operations and development. DevOps engineers are responsible for streamlining development, testing, and releasing software. These specialists ensure smooth collaboration and communication between the IT operations team and application development.
Moreover, DevOps will increase software development’s speed, security, and efficiency. It allows the continuous deployment, configuration management, integration, and real-time monitoring of the software product.
What Is a DevOps Engineer?
DevOps engineers are IT professionals who combine an understanding of coding and engineering. They collaborate with other system operators, software developers, and IT staff to manage code releases.
As one DevOps engineer, you might have to participate in the processes of strategic project planning meetings. Apart from planning projects. You are also expected to develop and build IT solutions.
You may be responsible for deploying new modules and upgrading fixes within the production environment whereas making modules ready for production.
Also, you may have to maintain, troubleshoot, and performance management.
DevOps Jobs
DevOps teams include trained and skilled experts who work together but accomplish diverse roles. Their responsibilities vary depending on the company.
There is no denying that each role of DevOps in organizations is critical to their DevOps journey. Here are some most common and high-demand roles:
- User experience engineer: This role will ensure a product meets the UX expectations and goals in alliance with testing and release goals.
- DevOps evangelist: This expert should aim to promote organizations’ DevOps initiatives and streamline their benefits with a significant interpersonal communication dependence.
- Security Engineer: This professional will focus on application security and infrastructure, focusing on data integrity and compliance.
- Software Tester: This role ensures a product meets defined quality assurance standards and is produced safely for customers.
- Software Developer: These professionals will be responsible for writing application code and updating it with IaC instruction sets and unit tests.
- Automation engineer: It plans and offers automation solutions to reduce manual, repetitive tasks while supporting CI/CD pipelines.
- Release Manager: It oversees continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and takes care of other tasks related to building and deploying applications.
- DevOps Engineer: These experts oversee the software development lifecycle and DevOps workflows and foster cross-team communication in one collaborative environment.
Education Requirements
Most companies require their candidates to have a bachelor’s degree in computer science or information systems technology. Some favor candidates with DevOps certifications.
So if you want to start your career in this field, it is essential to be familiar with the technologies used in DevOps, such as source control, automation, project management, cloud technology, continuous deployment, and continuous integration. Also, you must know how to work in Linux/ Unix environments.
DevOps engineers might need to have experience working with various software tools and commonly have backgrounds in system administration, software development, and IT. They should have experience or knowledge in these technical areas:
- Orchestration
- Source control
- Open source OS
- Cloud technology
- Container concepts
- Infrastructure automation
- Deployment automation and orchestration
Essential Skills
The following are some foundational skills that can help you build your DevOps career:
Basic Networking
Understanding how things such as DHCP, DNS, HTTP(S), and IP addressing work is an essential DevOps-related skill.
Configuration Management
Infrastructure as code is considered one of the popular DevOps concepts.
The idea is that managing your infrastructure, such as your code, will minimize errors and enable automation.
Puppet, Terraform, and Ansible are some excellent examples of prevalent configuration management tools.
Version Control & Source Code Management
In most cases, source code is where automated workflows begin. So you should at least get comfortable with the version control’s fundamentals and basic git commands. From the tools perspective, some platforms, such as GitLab, Bitbucket, and GitHub, often come into handy here.
Containerization
Docker, in particular, and Containers, in general, has become essential to delivering software. So as a DevOps engineer, being comfortable with container management and containers is a good idea.
Automated Build/Test
Automating pipelines will be helpful to many DevOps roles. So to begin your path, ensure you are comfortable with several popular tools and the basic concepts.
A Scripting Language
Scripting and programming skills should come in handy for DevOps engineers.
We recommend aiming for at least basic skills in one scripting language that allows you to start smoothly.
People Skills
Experts in this field rarely work alone. Instead, they are often part of a team. So good DevOps pros should be effective collaborators and communicators.
Also, depending on the industry and your job, the required skill list may take longer.
Essential Tools
Knowledge of these tools will help you build a successful DevOps career:
- Analytics tool.
- Monitoring tool.
- Collaboration tool.
- Issue tracking tool.
- Package manager.
- Continuous testing tool.
- Release orchestration tool.
- Application life management tool.
- Source control management tool.
- Continuous integration and continuous delivery tool.
- Configuration management, such as Puppet, Ansible, and Chef.
Job Outlook
DevOps Engineer jobs are always in high demand and tend to become more and more popular. The following are solid pieces of evidence that support this point:
- Glassdoor indicates that various companies are looking for DevOps pros, including Amazon, Apple, Adobe, Capital One, Autodesk, Cisco Systems, Intuit, Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Walt Disney Co., VMware, and more.
- Edureka says that DevOps is in the top 10 highest-paying jobs.
- Indeed indicates that DevOps is in the top 20 in-demand IT jobs.
- CodinGame ‘s developer survey stated DevOps practitioners are the most in-demand developers this year.
Salary
The salary you get as a DevOps engineer depends on many factors, one of which is your years of experience.
The average annual salary of an entry-level DevOps engineer is $86,000, according to our latest report.
But your salary will change as you grow in your career, such as:
Average senior-level DevOps engineers with at least 15 years of experience will have an average annual salary of $140,605, with a high of $188,000 and a low of $105,000.
As you can see, the average entry-level pay for DevOps engineers is approximately $83,094 per year. Meanwhile, the average pay for senior-level DevOps engineers is higher at about $134,894 yearly.
So, during your career, you might make an extra $50,000 yearly when you grow in tenure and experience.
Pros and Cons of Being a DevOps Engineer
Here are the great benefits of being a DevOps engineer and some downsides that might make you want to reconsider.
Pros
- Massive DevOps job growth
- High salary for DevOps jobs
- Multiple opportunities in the profession
- Make a real business impact
- Continuously evolving practice
- Work with cutting-edge technologies
- Endless possibilities to learn and develop
- Plenty of career progression is possible
- Upward mobility
Cons
- High-pressure atmosphere.
- Frustrations from butting heads with other technical teams.
FAQs
Is DevOps Engineer a Good Career?
Yes. It is one of the great career paths for IT professionals. DevOps engineers are paid significantly more than many average tech-driven and computer science roles.
Does A DevOps Engineer Code?
DevOps engineers may be responsible for managing updates and releasing new code, meaning they can understand and write code in some programming languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C, and Go.
Software developers use code as the primary communication channel between them, the DevOps engineer, and clients.
Is the DevOps Engineer An Excellent Job?
The short answer is yes. Being a DevOps engineer is a good job because of its high salary range.
Is DevOps Difficult To Learn?
Yes, it is hard to learn DevOps, which is a set of best practices to ensure continuous integration and delivery. As a result, as one DevOps engineer, you must have technical experience and skills, supervisory and leadership skills.
Also, you must be knowledgeable about those practices and use them efficiently for the best performance between operational engineers and developers.
How Long Does It Take Me to Become One DevOps Engineer?
It might take four years or more to become one DevOps engineer. The length of time is because you are usually required to have proper education and experience.
Most employers favor a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science. But others may ask for a master’s degree or many years of experience for a senior-level position.
Software Engineers vs. DevOps Engineers: What’s the Difference?
A DevOps engineer might work in both the operation and development of software, meaning they may be responsible for working on code with developer teams, overseeing the code releases, and managing the operation and deployment processes.
Their tasks might also include managing cloud deployment, accessing technological automation tools, monitoring operations, and maintaining security and compliance controls.
Is DevOps a Good Career for A Beginner?
Joining DevOps as a beginner may have many benefits. For example, DevOps engineers are in demand in various industries, and even beginners are paid well. There is scope to learn from experts and experience, and others.
Some firms prefer freshers, so they can be trained to meet their specific requirements. As a result, you can look forward to one fresh career in this field.
What Are the Benefits of DevOps?
Business Benefits
- Inventive Mindset
- Super-fast Delivery
- Prior Defect Detection
- Eliminates High Competition
- Easy Deployment and Release
- Exceed Customer Experience
- Boost Reliability, Reusability, Quality of Components
- Smooth Collaboration between Business, Development, and Operations
Benefits in Projects
- Lesser Failure
- Process Acceleration
- Reduced Recovery Time
Learning or Career Benefits
- Shorter Production Cycles
- Increase Efficiency via Automation
- Enhance Deployment Success Rates
- Opportunity to Work with Great Developers
- Amazing Collaboration and Communication
Is DevOps Engineer A Hard Job?
Like other jobs, there are several challenges to working as one DevOps engineer.
For example, the job might be rigorous and stressful. You also must have intuitive skills to find out how to handle problems.
Career Advice
Looking at the demand for these professionals and salary figures, it is easy to see that DevOps engineer jobs are promising careers.
Although this job is ideal for engineers with prior experience in IT and operations, anyone can pursue them.
But like career options, the general answer might be different than the answer that is proper for you. So you should consider the benefits and costs of this profession against your other job options and choose what makes sense for you.