DevOps combines high-powered tools, best practices and cultural philosophies to increase an organization’s ability to ship applications and services at a rapid pace in order to better serve customers and compete more effectively in the marketplace.
DevOps Tools and Skills You Need
- Version control
- Continuous integration servers
- Configuration management
- Deployment automation
- Containers
- Infrastructure orchestration
- Monitoring and analytics
- Testing and cloud quality tools
- Network protocols
What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?
DevOps engineers implement new processes, tools and methods that will support software throughout the development lifecycle.
DevOps engineers aim to break development and IT operations teams out of silos by facilitating Agile software development for more frequent and efficient deployments. Although development teams tend to handle the introduction of new features for an application, operations teams may be more focused on maintaining the stability of the application once it is released. A DevOps engineer, however, must find ways to combine these goals to unify the processes and promote Agile-style efficiency.
On a day-to-day basis, DevOps engineers may be responsible for combining code, maintaining applications and putting processes in place to ensure proper application management. DevOps engineers must understand the fundamentals of continuous integration/continuous delivery and security so builds can be created, tested effectively and deployed without vulnerabilities.
How Do I Start Learning DevOps?
Learning and implementing DevOps practices requires acquiring specific skills that facilitate Agile software engineering.
Necessary skills will vary based on the developmental needs of specific teams and the organizational practices of a company. Despite this, several principles can be considered requirements for becoming proficient in DevOps and Agile software engineering, including:
- Learning a programming language like Java, C, C#, Python or Ruby
- Understanding essential OS concepts like Kernel management, memory management, resource management, I/O management, virtualization and file system management
- Learning cloud deployment
- Understanding networking concepts like IP address, TLS encryption, routing, firewalls, DNS, HTTP and DNS
- Learning CI/CD pipeline and infrastructure as code (IaC)
- Understanding DevOps automation tools like AWS, Prometheus and Splunk
- Understanding the need for cloud providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and AWS
What Are DevOps Tools?
Implementing DevOps practices within a workplace requires the use of several applications that are capable of automating tasks to free up time for efficient development. DevOps engineers must know how to use and implement the following tools when iterating:
- Version control
- Continuous integration servers
- Configuration management
- Deployment automation
- Containers
- Infrastructure orchestration
- Monitoring and analytics
- Testing and cloud quality tools
- Network protocols
These tools automate several development processes from the software engineering and iteration cycle, including creating builds, managing conflicts, managing dependencies and deployment and reducing confusion across development teams.
DevOps tools also make it easier to foster collaboration across teams, as all employees will likely be using the same automation tools and will have knowledge of how to interact with another developer’s code. DevOps and automation engineers are still required to ensure all tools are compatible with environments being used to create products in both the pre- and post-production environments and don’t interfere with the usability of a feature once it reaches production, however.
