10 Skills that DevOps Engineer should Master

DevOps engineers play a vital role in modern IT. As application development and deployment methods change, organizations will seek experts with practical experience and display skills.

DevOps engineers are rapidly becoming key and multifaceted roles in leading companies. In the absence of a clear promotion path, the IT department must determine the right combination of experienced DevOps engineer skills.

Companies need senior leadership to successfully integrate development, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations as part of a continuous integration, continuous deployment, or DevOps plan. In a DevOps environment, people with specific skills (including a comprehensive understanding of collaboration and business practices) are needed to eliminate traditional silos, maintain and promote best practices in rapidly developing software projects, and achieve the best for the organization ’s work Business results, which led to the emergence of DevOps engineers.

The list of basic skills that DevOps engineers must possess is long, and even more skills are needed to master the role. Although the specific requirements of each organization are different, DevOps engineers need 10 skills-from high technology to soft skills.

1. Platform familiarity

IT organizations are usually built around the concept of a stack—combining mainstream OS, services, and related tool sets to develop, deploy, and support applications. There is often some overlap or cross training between stacks. However, the most successful and effective DevOps engineers have deep expertise in managing the stacks currently used or planned by the enterprise. The three main stacks are Microsoft Windows Server, Linux server distribution and cloud architecture.

The Microsoft stack typically includes operating systems such as Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019; management platforms such as System Center and its various iterations, including Operations Manager for system-level and service-level monitoring and notification; supporting applications such as MySQL and PostgreSQL Or Mongo is used for database, SharePoint is used for collaboration, etc.

The Linux stack is based on the open source OS kernel and may involve several common Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. It also includes many other open source tools (such as Ansible, Chef, and Puppet) and open source frameworks that support private clouds (such as OpenStack). Knowledge of VM platforms (such as VMware's vSphere or Linux KVM) and container platforms (such as Docker) is also critical. In recent years, with the proliferation of virtual machines and containers, the open source stack has attracted attention, which has led to high costs for licensing and software maintenance agreements.

2. Coding ability

DevOps practices vary between organizations, but in the end, they involve rapid development of code into the production environment. DevOps engineers may not write junior code, because this is usually left to the development team, but they need to understand the code, develop scripts, and solve integration problems, such as making the code version talk to the MySQL database and running the deployment on the operational side. The skills of DevOps engineers should include knowledge of PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby and other computer languages. DevOps engineers also benefit from the background of continuous integration management tools (such as Jenkins, Apache Maven or Apache Ant).

3. Configuration and version management

Speed and fluency are the hallmarks of the DevOps culture. The code is always changing. It requires good collaboration and version management skills to assess changing user needs, combine the right components, and craft an operational release. DevOps engineers use tools such as Git, Perforce, and Apache Subversion for repository (or repository) control. To better deploy this changing code, many DevOps engineers have adopted configuration management, which is almost always automated to speed up the release of versions. Tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Vagrant provide these features, and cloud provider's native tools (such as Alibaba Cloud) also provide these features.

4. Provisioning and deployment

DevOps engineers not only extend code through development; they provide the bridge needed to facilitate these releases in terms of operations. This means they need skills in IT hardware and infrastructure, from servers and storage to networking and OS. Because DevOps engineers understand the entire IT stack, they can guide the configuration and deployment of each version in the local data center or public cloud. This proprietary technology is often extended to create and maintain reliable and highly available services.

5. Security

DevOps engineers play an increasingly important role in enterprise security (development and operations). In terms of development, the DevOps team must create secure code, be responsible for open source software, and perform vulnerability testing in the CI / CD pipeline, etc. In terms of operation and maintenance, DevOps engineers must implement security measures, such as encrypting data at rest and in flight. This responsibility may overlap with more formal security tasks, such as managing anti-malware and intrusion prevention platforms.

6. Track and evaluate release performance

The DevOps engineer is the most perfect consultant. He can objectively evaluate the performance of each release, make necessary adjustments to the resources and platforms that have been deployed, and use various tools to measure the performance of workloads. In addition, engineers must analyze the log results, export the relevant key performance indicators, and then share the content with all employees to enhance future software iterations. Tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, Sensu, Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk, and Relic can monitor application performance on local and public cloud platforms. Performance management can also be extended to issue tracking and help desk support to prioritize tickets and investigate complex issues.

7. Network optimization

Modern enterprise workloads depend on network resources and security, so the skills of DevOps engineers should include a broad understanding of networks and network interfaces, and an understanding of workload bandwidth requirements. Network knowledge also attaches great importance to security, including the deployment and management of VPNs, and the use of software-defined networks for container-centric tasks (such as micro-segmentation).

8. Troubleshooting

DevOps engineers are often involved in day-to-day operations, and it is usually expected that such senior professionals provide technical support staff and other personnel with a large amount of problem-solving support, especially support related to the specific DevOps workloads in the deployment pipeline. This can include remote deployment and support tasks, such as deploying, managing, and troubleshooting workloads running in remote or hosted locations. Troubleshooting can also be extended to more traditional parts of the business infrastructure, such as remedies for server, storage, and network problems.

9. Integration

Modern software is more about integrating platforms and services than writing low-level code. For example, no one today creates a message sender or database function, and the code is integrated into existing platforms such as Exchange, SQL, Redis, or countless other third-party or open source business applications that use common APIs. These platforms are usually part of the business stack, but engineers should know how to use them. For example, if an enterprise associates software products with SQL backends, DevOps engineers should have the skills to set up databases and perform complex SQL queries.

10. Communication and team management

The skills of DevOps engineers are not only technical. The person in this position must be a professional communicator and a competent manager who can talk, walk around and understand the views of each team, and then gather these different professionals in a productive way Together to ensure the rapid and continuous development of the best business results.

As the DevOps process involves many people and conflicts of interest, as time goes by, inevitable countless technical and professional issues will arise. These include interpersonal conflicts, changes in roles and responsibilities within the organization, and disruption of business processes. DevOps engineers must evaluate these situations and seek constructive solutions to achieve their goals and satisfy colleagues. For example, if the release cycle is delayed due to inefficient manual steps, DevOps engineers can propose technical and commercial solutions to invest in automation.