Tech
What is a DevOps?
Here is the job description for a DevOps engineer. What is the role? The missions? The salary? What training is needed? What career paths are possible?
Before being a job, DevOps is an approach to building applications, even a company (or tech team) culture.
To understand the role, let's understand why it appeared. During an application's development cycle, developer teams write the code needed to make the application run, then hand it off to operations teams.
The developers' goal is to ship new features as quickly as possible.
Operations teams set up the infrastructure suited to running the application, then administer and operate it. As guardians of performance and stability, they put in place sometimes lengthy testing and quality control phases.
You can see it: the first team is asked to deliver fast, while the next is held responsible for keeping things running. Opposing team objectives that sometimes create friction. The first blames the second for slowing the production cycle and therefore delivery. The second, in turn, blames developers for shipping code without regard for quality.
That's where DevOps comes in, with its culture: bringing teams together under a common goal of reducing an application's delivery cycle, and therefore Time To Market.
What is the role of a DevOps?
Reducing Time To Market means accelerating an application's production cycle and being able to evolve it continuously.
In addition, technological innovations (Cloud, IoT, Mobile, etc.) increase the complexity of tech projects and the workload of technical teams.
By automating what can be automated, DevOps speeds up the production cycle and lightens each team's workload, freeing them up to be more available and effective on their other tasks.
In business terms, since DevOps influences the entire production chain, the impact can be very strong:
- Increases product quality
- Optimizes team work, increasing capacity at constant headcount.
- Increases the pace at which new features ship, allowing the product to stand out from the competition.
That's why every company is fighting to hire them!
The role by company size
Like many trendy roles, DevOps responsibilities vary depending on the company and its size. Depending on company maturity, hiring a dedicated DevOps isn't always necessary.
Their role is to optimize a production cycle, so a working process must already be in place. The role can therefore be handled by a back-end developer to address a few identified issues.
Still, their understanding of every step in the cycle can be a major asset for a company looking to set up an efficient development process.
The larger the technical team, the more they can focus on optimizing one stage of the production cycle, leaving other DevOps engineers to focus on the rest.
What are the missions of a DevOps?
Their role is to make life easier for technical teams across the entire production cycle, so many levers are available.
- Build tools to remove repetitive and time-consuming tasks from development teams
- Automate code integration (the CI in the famous CI/CD)
- Automate provisioning of working environments
- Automate functional tests
- Automate deployment (the CD in the famous CI/CD)
- Create metrics to measure process improvements.
- Foster team collaboration (DevOps culture) to align everyone on goals and challenges.
The more they automate, the easier their life gets, the faster production runs, and the less DevOps you need.
Where do they fit in the team?
Their levers span the entire production chain, so they may collaborate with all technical teams. Their experience and ability to solve complex problems let them operate at different levels of the hierarchy.
What are the skills of a DevOps?
The DevOps role is cross-functional and requires a strong understanding of the software development steps as well as deployment and production challenges.
Soft skills
Strong communication, logical thinking, and a taste for excellence are essential to be a great DevOps.
Technologies & platforms used
Hosting:
- AWS
- GCP
- Azure
Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
Ansible for server configuration management
Containerization:
- Docker for automation and deployment
- Kubernetes for orchestration
CI / CD:
- Jenkins: for CI
- Selenium for functional tests
- Puppet for automated deployment
What training is needed to become a DevOps?
To become a DevOps, one prerequisite is an engineering degree in computer science, or its university equivalent at the Master's level. Many things must be mastered that are only learned on the job: development, system administration, and architecture.
Moving into a DevOps role is possible after gaining experience in development and system administration; one of the two backgrounds will be more valued depending on the company's challenges and projects.
A solid command of back-end development is also necessary, since DevOps continue to write code, and/or experience as a SysAdmin depending on company needs.
Experience across different projects is an asset for understanding and mastering the various stages of software development.
What is the salary of a DevOps?
Depending on experience level, a DevOps earns:
Junior DevOps: 40 - 50 K€
Mid-level DevOps: 48 - 60 K€
Senior DevOps: 60 - 100K€+
How can a DevOps career evolve?
A DevOps can become:
- Lead DevOps
- Head of Infra
- VP Engineering Manager