The Responsibilities of Cloud Native DevOps Engineers

Cloud native DevOps is a relatively new collection that contains old concepts and ideas. They are combined due to the need to solve the deficiencies of the old methods of building applications. To understand the work that cloud-native DevOps engineers do every day, you need to understand that the goal of cloud-native models is to build applications that can be easily adapted and resilient using cloud tools. The foundation of cloud-native computing includes four main concepts: microservices, containers, CI/CD, and DevOps.

Microservices is a method of developing applications into a series of small, dedicated services that are combined to form a complete product. These functions are packaged into containers like Docker and then pushed through the continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline. The modularity of microservices enables different teams to work in parallel on different parts of the product without interfering with each other, and also enhances the product by reducing the impact of the failure of any of these services on other services.

Using containers to host microservices is very effective because containers use system resources more efficiently than traditional virtual machines. They only need to run services related to the applications they host, not the entire guest operating system and its corresponding processes. Containers are essential for the agile deployment of cloud-native applications, especially when used with management software such as Kubernetes. All of these are the foundations that make CI/CD possible. Without the flexibility provided by these tools, these CI processes that allow changes, fixes, or push functions to the production environment, from development to automated code review and testing, will be very difficult.

DevOps uses all these and even more tools to solve the so-called silo problem, which is what happens when developers write code and throw it to the Ops department. As a result of developers not owning their code from beginning to end, Ops departments often need to be responsible for maintaining code that does not consider infrastructure. The solution here is not just to create a third closed environment that combines development and operations roles.

DevOps is not just a process or a job, it is also a culture of ownership.
DevOps engineers try to cultivate the "who develops and maintains" concept, which means they need to assess the bottlenecks that may plague application production from the beginning of the software development process. Cloud-native DevOps engineers need to be able to obtain applications through the CI/CD process to ensure that the code can be built, tested, and deployed without disrupting the production environment. This motivates them to think about how the application works before it is created, and write scripts to create a continuous integration pipeline to ensure faster time to market and a better user experience.

The best DevOps engineers will be able to use or learn various open source technologies and be familiar with a large number of programming languages used to write scripts. They have some experience in IT systems, operations and data management and can integrate this knowledge into the CI/CD development model. Crucially, DevOps engineers not only need to write code, but also consider the actual business results of the products they develop. Global thinking like this also requires strong soft skills to enable communication across teams and between customers and technical teams.

Of course, no one is an island. Although the DevOps team operates under the coverage of the same organization, it needs a variety of different roles to be competent. The actual titles of these team members may vary from place to place, but the general responsibilities remain the same:
Product owner (responsible for team work): This person acts as the liaison for the customer team. They need particularly strong soft skills and the ability to effectively communicate technical concepts in order to work with customers and come up with products that meet expectations. They understand the big picture and can tell the team how to run the application and what infrastructure to use.
Team leader (responsible for the way the team works): This person is the management type role of the technical team. They delegate responsibilities based on the team members' personal strengths and skill sets. They also contribute code, but in the context of short-term development sprints, they keep the team and the product owner's overall view consistent. They usually have the final say on technical decisions.
Automation Architect/Site Reliability Engineer (SRE): This person has extensive experience in building cloud infrastructure and understands what is needed to support applications in production. They develop automated systems to ensure that continuous deployment runs smoothly. They focus on ensuring the stability of the infrastructure in a large-scale environment and understand how to expand the infrastructure as the company grows.
Software developer: The software developer will work with all the team members listed previously, and create the code according to the customer's requirements, and then test, deploy, and monitor.

As the team grows, these roles may be divided into several other more fine-grained positions in order to utilize the increased human resources. UX engineers, test engineers and security engineers are some examples, they will take important responsibilities from some of the others listed and expand them.