DevOps engineers focus on tasks such as ensuring effective communication and collaboration between software development and operations teams, implementing automation processes such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and managing infrastructure with code.
A highly technologically complex role , DevOps engineering requires familiarity with common programming languages such as Node.JS, Python, or batch scripting.
Although mastering technical skills is predicted to be key in DevOps engineering, information gathered from real DevOps practitioners reveals that soft skills are often more important.
The most important DevOps capabilities
1-Soft Skills
Social skills, which express individuals’ abilities such as social interaction, communication, leadership, problem solving, and teamwork, also include topics such as emotional intelligence, empathy, solution-oriented thinking, and time management.
Lack of social skills causes the DevOps engineer to fail to establish a proper bond with the agile team. This prevents business processes from being completed as quickly and effectively as expected.
DevOps engineers must fit in with the rest of the development team to be effective. In addition to synchronizing with their development team, DevOps engineers also serve as an important point of contact for external stakeholders trying to access the software platform.
Therefore, DevOps engineers need to be able to convey the technical complexity of the cloud environment in a non-technical way so that stakeholders can understand it.
2-Networking
The technology landscape of modern cloud platforms includes file system services, multiple database services, backend APIs, server or serverless architectures, frontend services, machine learning models, hybrid environments, virtual private networks, various real-time streaming services, and much more.
While it’s impossible to know everything about all of these, DevOps engineers need to know how to connect them all into a single functional software platform to create a powerful network.
3-Software tests
Leveraging automation is inevitable in the project lifecycle, which includes planning, estimating, developing, testing and releasing. Being successful in this type of setup requires intense focus on test automation.
Thanks to automated testing, faster deployments enable users to provide feedback to developers in a shorter time.
Creating effective test scenarios to cover all critical processes is of great importance for DevOps engineers. Even if business analysts or quality assurance managers are not part of the team, they can take part in helping DevOps engineers in this regard. However, it is the responsibility of the DevOps engineer to convert this process into code to automate it.
4-CI/CD and infrastructure as code
Defining infrastructure as code is among the main tasks of DevOps engineers. In this process, all input from the development team is connected with real infrastructure environments. A usable software is then created that can be deployed repeatedly across different environments.
A successful agile team needs to implement infrastructure as code and deploy it into continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. DevOps engineers play an active role in the realization of this process.
5-Container use
In large-scale projects, fast copying is critical for the rapid progress of business processes. Containerized environments are needed to create hundreds of copies of the same environment at the same time.
However, for DevOps engineers, the skill of using containers requires a difficult learning curve.
The output always remains the same on the container server, which is a template that can be applied whenever needed. This feature, which DevOps engineers can create for the team, also needs to be learned using different tools.
Implementing container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes or Docker Swarm and automatically managing container deployment, scaling, and recovery are among the DevOps engineer’s responsibilities.
