DevOps engineer: Skills, tools, career path and growth guide

The IT sector is a lucrative field to work in and provides a significant amount of opportunities for individuals with the correct skills and experience to gain a high-paying career with plenty of room for advancement.

For professionals with the ability to obtain certain security clearances, or those carrying them over from previous jobs, the opportunities are even greater. The threat of cyber attacks is constantly growing as criminals find new, innovative ways to threaten organisations. In fact, Check Point research revealed the second quarter of 2024 saw a 30 per cent increase in the global volume of cyber attacks.

Consequently, businesses are searching for professionals to command their defence measures. In order to do that, individuals will be tasked with handling sensitive information and as such, will be required to demonstrate trustworthiness and integrity.

A major hiring trend at the moment is for experts with development and operations (DevOps) skills and experience. So, if you have worked in this area before, or you’re looking to move into the IT sector for the first time, these job opportunities could be the perfect next step in your career.

DevOps is an increasingly popular area of the IT field and describes a series of working practices and philosophies that come together to reduce software development cycles and facilitate the continuous delivery of high-quality applications.

In simple terms, DevOps is when people work together to ideate, build and deliver highly secure software at top speed. The process is used to encourage a more collaborative environment throughout every stage of the development cycle and, ultimately, improve the overall flow.

Key responsibilities of a DevOps engineer

Specific DevOps engineer responsibilities will vary depending on the company you work for, so it’s always important to take a careful look at the job description when applying for a role. Most DevOps engineering positions will involve some form of combination of the following:

Managing CI/CD pipelines

A continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is crucial for DevOps teams, as it lays out iterative, reliable code delivery processes. One of the most important DevOps engineer skills is to manage this framework effectively.

Automating infrastructure provisioning

DevOps engineers are also system administrators whose responsibilities include deploying and maintaining servers and storage capabilities. Infrastructure provisioning will likely involve managing physical servers, storage devices, switches and virtualisation software in a data centre if an organisation has on-premise resources. Alternatively, everything could be hosted on a cloud platform.

Monitoring system performance and security

Overseeing the development process from start to finish comes under the remit of DevOps, which means monitoring planning, development, integration, testing, deployment and operations. Being familiar with a wide selection of DevOps tools enables an engineer to have a real-time view of the status of all applications and infrastructure in the production environment to review its performance.

What are the key skills and requirements for a DevOps engineer?

Typically, employers will require candidates to hold a degree in a STEM or other technical subject, with some also demanding a master's degree. However, there are entry-level opportunities out there and some businesses offer these positions to graduates of any subject.

If you’re new to the field, it’s worth seeking out internships or placements. There are also online courses that can offer the chance to explore the processes behind DevOps and start putting them into practice.
Throughout your career, employers could ask you to obtain specific qualifications. Some of the most useful and in-demand include:

In terms of the skills needed to succeed in a DevOps career, here are some of the most important.

Communication

Like many jobs, it’s vital that DevOps engineers are able to collaborate and communicate efficiently with other professionals, teams, stakeholders and customers. Soft skills are constantly undervalued, but when it comes to this position, you’ll quickly find out how integral solid communication skills will be across the entire development cycle.

System architecture

You’ll need the skills to design, provision and manage computer networks as a DevOps engineer. This also means that understanding how to model system infrastructure in the cloud is a requirement.

Configuration management

Employers are often looking for candidates with experience in at least one configuration management tool, like Puppet, Chef or Ansible. Plenty of organisations have implemented these tools into their system administration tasks, such as applying security patches or deploying new systems.

DevOps experience

Tools are a crucial part of DevOps practices. So, an engineer must fully understand the best way to implement a wide array of them, from those in infrastructure and building to others in operating a product or service.

How to become a DevOps engineer

Developing the technical skills, knowledge and experience to become a DevOps engineer takes time and requires a number of steps. The first is to gain academic credentials, with the basic minimum being a bachelor’s degree, and computer science and computer engineering the most relevant subjects to take.

Several diploma and master’s degree courses are also available for those wishing to take their studies further. This could enable candidates to bypass entry-level DevOps engineer roles and advance more quickly up the hierarchy with their careers.

It’s then time to gain some industry certifications and there are lots to choose from. It’s a good idea to get one or two under your belt before applying for roles, but to keep others in mind to continually improve your professional development once you’ve started working.

Professional certifications to consider include:

To stand out from the crowd and get yourself a DevOps engineer interview, you’ll also need some practical experience. Internships are a good way to go about this, giving you the chance to learn industry best practices and in some cases be mentored by more senior engineers. During your internship, you should be able to see developers and operational teams, cloud computing and continuous delivery in action.

DevOps tools every engineer should know

DevOps tools can aid an engineer in a variety of ways, including introducing automation, leveraging observability and monitoring, and improving collaboration within a team. Each phase of the DevOps lifecycle relies on different tools, so it’s important that candidates have a working knowledge of some of the most popular options.

Jenkins

This open-source automation server is useful to DevOps engineers during software development, especially the areas involving building, testing, deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. Automating software development helps to improve efficiency and accuracy.

Docker

A set of platform-as-a-service products, Docker uses OS-level virtualisation to deliver software in packages known as containers. It integrates with multiple building, shipping and running apps on various systems, making it a diverse DevOps tool.

Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) software tool that enables you to define and provision resources across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments. Its modular design and declarative syntax make it a versatile option for managing infrastructure at scale.

Kubernetes

Originally designed by Google, Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system used by DevOps engineers to automate software deployment, scaling and management. Now, it’s maintained by a community of interested contributors across the world. It can be integrated with Docker easily, improving its effectiveness even further.

DevOps engineer salary and career growth

The average salary for a DevOps Engineer ranges from £42,000 and £67,000 a year depending on experience and location. That doesn’t include additional compensation in the form of bonuses and other benefits, which averages at £4,000, but can be as high as £7,000.

Demand for DevOps roles is increasing globally, with significant growth potential and the top 25 per cent of best earners in the industry are on a salary of more than £80,000 a year. The highest ten per cent of DevOps engineers are taking home in excess of £98,400 annually.

Obtaining security clearance is a good way to increase your earning potential as a DevOps engineer, as it will open up roles in a number of industries that handle sensitive information or data. 

Challenges faced by DevOps engineers

DevOps as an organisational approach should facilitate the development of apps and ease the maintenance of existing deployments, but despite its purpose in accelerating processes, there are a number of challenges a DevOps engineer will face regularly, including:

  • Dealing with complex architectures, which can be tackled with continuous integration.
  • Managing tools in a way that ensures they’re properly integrated with each other.
  • Maintaining system security without slowing down development.
  • Moving away from legacy applications to new microservices architecture.
  • Managing multiple environments simultaneously as the application’s complexity increases.
  • Understanding how to quantify success and communicate it to stakeholders.

Future of DevOps engineering

One of the things that might attract an individual to a career in DevOps engineering is that it’s a constantly evolving field. No matter how well you’ve got to grips with the infrastructure management, development and operational challenges, there’ll always be something new on the horizon.

Some have predicted that AI could replace DevOps, but the reality is it’s likely to be used to streamline and automate software development and deployment processes instead. Analysing data, identifying bottlenecks and making informed decisions will all become easier as AI facilitates the role of a DevOps engineer.

Automation and IaC will continue to replace many manual processes and the implementation of settings. Using it to test applications in environments akin to where the product will be used at an early stage in the development cycle is set to continue to improve outcomes.
 

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