The Most In-Demand DevOps Skills

DevOps is a combination of skill sets. However, these are the most in-demand DevOps skills currently.

A DevOps engineer needs specific interpersonal, tooling and technical skills to succeed. In other words, a DevOps engineer requires a mix of “soft” and “hard” skills.

You’re in great shape if you already possess some of these in-demand DevOps skills. If not, this should provide a framework to help you improve and refine your existing skillset.

1. Communication and Collaboration Skills

One of the first in-demand DevOps skills is bringing a collaborative approach to software development, testing and deployment. It puts small teams with varying objectives to work toward more efficient and high-quality code releases. There cannot be any barriers between the different personas, making communication skills (verbal and written) necessary for a successful DevOps engineer.

Engineers need to speak regularly with internal management teams involved in the DevOps process and stay familiar with the objectives, roadmap, blocking issues and other project areas, In addition, they need to effectively communicate with customers around support issues.

Communication is critical, but so too is the ability to collaborate. DevOps engineers should be team players and support their colleagues throughout sprints or software iterations. This is about more than being a good teammate- you should have skills to mentor and advise team members on the best ways to deliver code, what tools to use when coding and how to test the latest features.

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2. Familiarity and Understanding of the DevOps Tool Chain

In addition to collaboration and communication, a DevOps engineer must know how to use an assortment of complex tools that work together to support software delivery objectives.

DevOps engineers need to know how to use and understand the roles of the following types of tools:

• Version control
• Continuous Integration Servers
• Configuration Management
• Deployment Automation
• Containers
• Infrastructure Orchestration
• Monitoring and Analytics
• Testing and Cloud Quality tools
• Network Protocols

You are responsible for ensuring everything plays nicely together during the pre-and post-production stages. Every tool serves a purpose in the pipeline, so knowing how and when each contributes and which dependencies to consider is key to a flawless delivery chain.

3. Specific Programming Skills with Mature Coding Standards

Though programming skills are required for all development approaches, DevOps engineers maintain a unique set of coding responsibilities. Rather than specialise in a single scripting language, such as Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Bash and others. A DevOps engineer must feel comfortable writing and debugging issues in languages such as those and in OS environments.

DevOps engineers should apply these coding skills to either orchestrate a stable and efficient pipeline as much as possible or build new tools that can automate pipeline stages to optimise team activities.

More importantly, a DevOps engineer must be sound in test automation. You must first write clean code in multiple languages and ensure your code integrates with the code developed by other teams – often created in different environments.

In addition, since DevOps is all about CI/CD, you must confidently manage complex automated delivery pipeline phases through Jenkins and/or other servers. This requires discipline, attention to detail and an end-to-end understanding as you automate processes or enter code changes into the pipeline.

4. Syncing with QA Teams

With the above in mind, DevOps engineers must always be in sync with QA teams. All testing activities, including automated and manual, must be known and visible to DevOps engineers to ensure the organization meets sprint goals for release dates and outcomes. The DevOps engineer should:

• Understand the testing activities that happen
• Know the history of testing throughout the CI/CD cycle
• Understand frameworks/environments that QA leads

With this knowledge, the DevOps engineer can determine relevant steps toward deployment and optimisations and determine if QA activities, tools, and frameworks can be reused for other tasks within DevOps, such as reproducing production issues, working with specific test environments and accessing platforms that QA uses.

Test Automation

As mentioned earlier, DevOps engineers should know their way around test automation, enabling them to move faster with daily deliverables, such as production monitoring and testing. For organizations moving toward DevOps, we recommend that the DevOps engineer collaborate closely with QA and determine what existing test automation frameworks can be leveraged elsewhere in the DevOps framework.

Moving toward DevOps does not mean a DevOps engineer should just declare, ‘Automate everything!’ Manual testing will always have a role to play, even in a fast-moving CI/CD environment.

Like any other automation task, there is no possible way to automate and maintain 100% of testing activities. Hence, the DevOps engineer must leave the room and have an open mind for manual and guided exploratory testing. Test automation excels at following the happy path, but exploratory testing is necessary to:

• Explore the alternative paths that customers will take
• Test scenarios that are too complex to automate
• Test scenarios that do not have sufficient ROI over time to automate

Manual testing — such as what Applause specializes in, powered by testing teams sourced from its global community — provides great added value from an exploratory view and allows for creativity, alternate and changing flows, unexpected yet reasonable inputs and outputs, and many other factors that are more closely aligned with how a real user will interact with your product. DevOps engineers who can find the right balance between what they should automate and what is left for manual testing will put the products they support in the best position for success in an increasingly demanding atmosphere.

With that in mind, it should be noted that such balance will and must evolve with changes happening to the systems under tests and the tests themselves.

5. Non-Functional DevOps Skills

Beyond “soft” skills, DevOps engineers also need to be proficient in monitoring production environments and performance measurements, as well as security and cloud administration. This helps ensure that new builds run properly in production. Building Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in many organisations enables velocity and automation. Thus, a DevOps engineer should know such technologies (or, at a larger organization that includes multiple DevOps engineers, each one must have at least passable knowledge of all areas and the ability to collaborate with those with complete expertise in specific areas).

Finally, DevSecOps — which integrates security practices into DevOps processes — is becoming an essential pillar within the pipeline. Since DevOps requires that code ships quickly in small chunks, DevOps engineers should take an active role in continuously ensuring the delivered code’s security.

6. Technical Support and Maintenance Skills

Good DevOps engineers do not simply execute on the development side but support and maintain a seamless process that includes IT operations. A DevOps engineer owns and operates the fundamental tools and environments that the entire DevOps team uses, including customer-facing capabilities. This means that a DevOps engineer should feel comfortable supporting internal and external clients and troubleshooting issues when they arise.

Additionally, a DevOps engineer show knows how to ensure production systems’ uptime and availability. This means that DevOps engineers ought to have the ability to:

• Monitor the products in real-time
• Get proper alerts when something is wrong or unavailable
• Help resolve problems either through online support or technical troubleshooting

Having the solution up and running 24/7 is mandatory for DevOps management, and the DevOps engineers are central to this.

Bottom Line

DevOps relies on individuals across functions working together toward the same objective — rapid, continuous delivery of high-quality code. DevOps engineers are the engine that makes the team go to succeed in this endeavour. They are the ones who enable practitioners through automated tools, testing, orchestration techniques and communication to efficiently satisfy their customers.

As the market continues to evolve, it is only natural for the role of the DevOps engineer to grow and absorb more responsibilities — especially from the non-functional bucket, such as security and monitoring analytics.

Start by focusing on the in-demand DevOps skills and responsibilities here, and you will find yourself in high demand.

Content by Applause