Secrets of Becoming a Successful DevOps Engineer

DevOps has taken the center stage in the software industry. The job role of a DevOps Engineer is buzzing around. Today, I have some thoughts that can guide you to become a great DevOps engineer.

What Is DevOps?

The term DevOps was coined as a combination of developers and operations. According to Wikipedia:

DevOps is a term used to refer to a set of practices that emphasize the collaboration and communication of both software developers and information technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims at establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

Digital transformation is happening in every sector today — and if you don't adapt yourself to the changing technology advancements, your business is likely to die in the coming years. Automation being the key, every company nowadays wants to get rid of repetitive tasks and automate them as much as possible to increase productivity. Here is where DevOps comes into the picture. It's derived from Agile and Lean tech aspects but it's still new in the software industry today. 

With the increasing usage of tools and platforms like Docker, AWS, Puppet, GitHub, etc., companies can easily leverage automation and succeed their way.

What Is a DevOps Engineer?

A major part of adopting DevOps is creating a better working relationship between development and operations teams. Some suggestions to do this include sitting the teams together, involving them in each other's processes and workflows, and even creating one cross-functional team that does everything. In all these methods, Dev is still Dev and Ops is still Ops. 

The term DevOps Engineer tries to blur this divide between Dev and Ops and suggests that the best approach is to hire engineers who can be excellent coders as well as handle all the Ops functions. In short, a DevOps engineer can be a developer who can think with an Operations mindset and has the following skillset:

• Familiarity and experience with a variety of Ops and automation tools. 
• Great at writing scripts.
• Comfortable with dealing with frequent testing and incremental releases.
• Understanding of Ops challenges and how they can be addressed during design and development.
• Soft skills for better collaboration across the team.

How Can You Be a Great DevOps Engineer?

The key to being a great DevOps Engineer is to focus on the following:

• Know the basic concepts of DevOps and get into the mindset of automating almost everything.
• Know about different DevOps tools like AWS, GitHub, Puppet, Docker, Chef, New Relic, Ansible, Shippable, JIRA, Slack, etc.
• Have an organization-wide Ops mindset. There are many common Ops pitfalls that developers need to consider while designing software. Reminding developers of these during design and development will go a long way in avoiding these altogether rather than running into issues and then fixing them. Try to standardize this process by creating a checklist that is part of a template for design reviews.
• End-to-end collaboration and helping others solve issues are key.
• You should be a scripting guru — Bash, Powershell, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, you name it. You must be able to write code to automate repeatable processes.

Factors to Measure DevOps Success

• Deployment frequency.
• Lead time for code changes.
• Rollback rate.
• Usage of automation tools for CI/CD.
• Test automation.
• Meeting business goals.
• Faster time-to-market.
• Customer satisfaction percentage.