DevOps is a position shrouded in mystery. These professionals are not quite systems administrators, but not quite systems engineers or developers, either. They’re the wise, senior engineers who can often be found hunched over their terminals, running tests, and managing deployments.
To those junior front-end developers and database guys, the DevOps team are wizards. But what does a DevOps engineer actually do?
The job of a DevOps engineer is one of the most challenging in the field of software development. These engineers are responsible for infrastructure automation, deployment, and some scripting and coding.
Depending on the size of the organization and the project, they might do small, in-house compiling, testing, and building, or be responsible for DevOps with AWS deployment. These tasks require a good understanding of cloud infrastructure, security, and management. Each of those areas could be considered a standalone job. Software testing is a rapidly expanding field, for example. DevOps workers bring everything together.
A good DevOps engineer has experience in several areas, including:
- Coding and scripting
- Communicating with other IT specialists
- Process re-engineering
It’s rare for someone to move straight into the world of DevOps. Usually, an IT specialist will start in one area and broaden their skill set over many years. By the time they’re ready to work in DevOps, they’ll be a jack of all trades with a reasonable understanding of many tools, languages, and frameworks:
- Day-to-day Linux usage and familiarity with the command line
- Shell scripting in Bash or similar languages
- Scripting in Perl, Python, or Ruby
- Enough other programming experience to understand compiler errors
- Familiarity with VMs and containerization with Docker/Kubernetes
- CI/CD with Jenkins, Maven, etc
- Source code management with Git
- AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud experience
- Configuration management with Puppet, Ansible, or similar tools
The world of DevOps is constantly evolving. This means engineers must be committed to keeping up to date with the latest developments in the world of systems administration, testing, and development.
DevOps Engineer Roles & Project Experience
AWS launched Amazon DevOps Guru in January 2021, having unveiled it the year before. It helps identify problems with under-provisioned compute capacity, memory leaks, and misconfigured alarms. It also delivers an integrated dashboard with pages that display anomalies and provide some contextual information and recommendations on what to do.
Issues can be classed as reactive or proactive, depending on whether they either exist currently or may occur in the future. This helps software developers more precisely pinpoint issues with code and highlights future issues that may need resolving quickly. This is part of Amazon’s attempt to foray into the MLOps field.
Ultimately, if you need a solid partner who can handle DevOps with AWS, talk to Sonatafy today. We can handle a huge range of scenarios, including integrating existing platforms into AWS using our skilled teams today.
It’s easy to follow some tutorials and get a passing familiarity with all of the technologies listed above, but there’s no substitute for real-world experience. It’s one thing to have been told about the OWASP Top 10, it’s another to run security tests against a real-world app, diagnose issues, and fix them.
Recruiters often decry the idea of the ‘paper MCSE’ — someone who has passed such certification through cramming and boot camps but lacks the experience with big teams and projects to back up the qualification. Because the DevOps team is responsible for speeding up the development lifecycle by allowing a more iterative, continuous deployment approach, they need to be comfortable working in large teams and communicating with people who have very different skill sets.
Finding in-house talent that covers all of the bases needed for a large software development project could be difficult. That’s where nearshore software developers can be useful. Whether you’re looking for a junior DevOps with AWS experience, or someone who can help your team get started with Jenkins, or who has the Kubernetes expertise required to augment your Machine Learning work, nearshoring gives you access to the talent you need.
Making the leap to outsourcing and trusting external employees with parts of your project can be intimidating at first. Nearshore software developers offer the best of both worlds. They’re in a similar time zone to the rest of your team and are fluent English speakers, making communication easy. They’re affordable, highly motivated, and committed to maintaining relevant, current skills in software development.
At Sonatafy, we take pride in vetting all of our nearshoring workers so we can match them with the right teams and projects. Call us today to discuss your project, and we’ll put you in touch with the right engineers that match your team’s culture and skills.
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