The rise of the DevOps engineer

Over the last 12 months there has been an exponential rise in demand for DevOps Engineers. Many organisations are turning to innovative cloud and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers to manage complex backend service changes and improvements. Most notably, the shift from Monolith on-premises systems to the cloud requires niche skills that DevOps Engineers have in their armoury.

So what exactly is a DevOps Engineer?

Using a combination of Software Development and IT Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps Engineers are IT professionals who automate the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.

A DevOps Engineer is an expert in the latest server-side and cloud technologies enabling organisations to improve their IT infrastructure and creating a service that is both quicker and more reliable for customers. This can give organisations competitive advantage in today’s increasingly competitive environment where customers are easily put off by IT system inefficiencies.

So what skills should a successful DevOps Engineer possess and what experience are companies looking for when hiring their next DevOps Engineer?

As a DevOps Engineer organisations will be looking to hire professionals who have knowledge and skills in Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Jenkins. It is usually required that are also skilled in languages such as Python, Perl, and Ruby. In some complex systems there may even be a need for the DevOps engineer to be competent across all three of these languages.

In terms of experience, organisations generally require more than 3 years of experience within server and systems administration or as a traditional Infrastructure Engineer.

A rapidly evolving field

DevOps is a rapidly changing and evolving area of IT infrastructure and Software Development. Containerisation technology (Containerisation is an alternative to full machine virtualisation which involves encapsulating an application in a container with its own operating environment which improves scalability and lowers costs). Consequently, Docker and other containerisation technology platforms such as Azure are expanding and creating further demand for DevOps engineers.

From DevOps to NoOps

Over the last 7 years the transition from manual ops to DevOps has really blossomed and the latest developments in automation and machine learning for solving operational problems looks set to increase the number of companies that implement NoOps. NoOps is the concept that humans should solve new problems whilst robots/automation should solve known problems. This would eliminate the need for humans to manage operations, saving time for DevOps Engineers and money for organisations as the machines can make decisions on known problems and can help to provide information to solve newer problems more efficiently and with greater accuracy.

With the sheer quantity of time and money DevOps Engineers can save an organisation, it’s unsurprising that this will be an in-demand role now and for the future.

 

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