DevOps engineer has been the most demanding role in the IT industry past few years.
Here are some top skills organizations look for in an AWS DevOps engineer. Giant conglomerates like Amazon, Netflix, and Adobe are switching to DevOps work culture to deliver software products and services rapidly. According to the survey of CIOinsight, DevOps is among the top 10 best-paying IT jobs in the world. But have you wondered why DevOps has been so popular these days? Continuous delivery, time to market, security are some of the major USPs of DevOps, which makes it popular in the IT markets. AWS cloud and However, DevOps is easy to learn and hard to master. Practicing DevOps professionally is not easy to come by.
If you aspire to become an AWS DevOps or hire an AWS DevOps engineer for your enterprise, the following are some of the key skills one should look for:-
- Communication and Collaboration: DevOps is a philosophy or a mindset that bridges the gap between the development and operations teams. A strong DevOps manager must be a great team member. Pro DevOps engineers should provide well-organized goals for both Dev and Ops teams. This action will make both teams work towards a common goal. In particular, you, as a DevOps engineer, need to inspire smart people to work as a single unit.
- Continuous Delivery: To pursue an AWS DevOps engineer, one needs to master the concept of continuous delivery and apply them in real-world scenarios. To make a completely functioning application, every individual should integrate different tools and systems. They should know how to set up CI/CD pipelines to automate the release for the production of the application. AWS tools used for continuous delivery are AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline. Other popular tools include Jenkins, GitLab, Travis, etc.
- Cloud skills: Cloud and DevOps go hand in glove with each other. Both are dependent and influenced by each other. DevOps is process-oriented while cloud is platform-oriented. Cloud provides platform test, deploy and release code. As an AWS DevOps engineer, you will architect and develop cloud-native systems along with their complexity and limitations.
One needs to be a subject matter expert in areas like cloud infrastructure of the organization/client, site & data migration, building and maintaining technical infrastructure.
To practice AWS, one must learn tools like Amazon EC2, Amazon DevOps Guru, Amazon DynamoDB.
- Infrastructure automation: Automation is the heart of the DevOps process. Automation reduces human effort and increases efficiency. As an AWS DevOps engineer, you should be a subject matter expert on designing CI/CD pipelines, configuration management, performance monitoring, and so on. Deep coding and scripting skills are required to do wonders in DevOps. Automation also facilitates high-velocity delivery of working applications to the end-user. Automating manual processes defines the reliability of the DevOps engineer. Eventually, automation helps shift the organization’s focus towards business-oriented rather than tiresome and repeated procedures.
- Configuration Management: Automation of operating systems into distributed patterns is done using various configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Saltstack, etc. AWS DevOps engineer needs to configure the manual processes of monitoring, logging, auditing, and alerting the data generated by applications.
- Software Security: DevOps believes in fast software development and rapid delivery. The faster the development of software more the number of vulnerabilities. To avoid this security constraint DevSecOps comes in the DevOps scenario. It integrates security into SDLC right from the start. Hence, there is no room left for marginal errors. As a DevOps engineer, you should not fix the security issues in the code but predict and eliminate them from start.
It would help if you were an expert in code analysis, change management, threat investigation, and vulnerability management.
AWS identity management, Amazon Inspector, AWS shield are tools specific to AWS DevOps.
- Testing: Testing plays a vital role in DevOps. Automating the DevOps pipelines has no meaning without continuous testing. A DevOps engineer’s responsibility is to make sure every test is running as it should so that customers can rest assured about what has been served. In DevOps culture, automated tests are run at all stages, from development to deployment. This makes sure that all the features are working fine without any loopholes.
Finally, the quality end product is delivered, enhancing the end-user experience.
- Command on prominent tools As a DevOps engineer, you have to be an all-rounder. Be it development, testing, release, cloud, or the database, you need to have hands-on experience. The tools required to master these technologies are as follows: • Scripting: Linux, Unix shell, Python. • Deployment tools: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc. • CI/CD pipelines: Travis CI. BitBucket, GitLab, GitHub. • Containerization: Docker and Kubernetes. • Application Monitoring: Prometheus, Nagios, etc. • AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodeBuild are some DevOps tools specific for AWS DevOps engineers.
- Customer is God. The end goal for any DevOps engineer is to deliver the best end-user experience. Therefore, a DevOps engineer has to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders, developers, testers, and project managers to optimize everything to achieve the single business goal. Moreover, DevOps engineer needs to monitor all the activities of SDLC closely and analyze how often the organization can satisfy customer needs.
Consequently, having such a kind attitude will accelerate business growth in no time.
To enumerate, DevOps is a game-changing career for both experienced professionals and beginners.
These 9 skills are the need of the hour if you want to run a marathon in DevOps. Moreover, having expertise in such a skillset will make you an all-rounder in the software industry. Furthermore, DevOps will also open many gates for you when you feel like shifting your domain.