DevOps engineers are IT professionals who oversee code releases and the relationship between development and IT operations teams within an organisation. They aim to establish a culture of collaboration between teams that historically have been siloed. DevOps seeks to automate and streamline the build, test and release processes via a continuous delivery pipeline.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It emerged to shorten systems development life cycles while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives. 

In a DevOps culture, there’s emphasis on communication, collaboration, integration and automation. The goal is to improve the speed and quality of delivering applications and services. DevOps helps organisations rapidly produce software products and services, while managing unplanned work and staffing needs efficiently.

Evolution of DevOps Roles and Responsibilities

The emergence of DevOps over the past decade has led to the creation of some specialised roles that blend software engineering, quality assurance and IT operations skills. DevOps engineer is probably the most prominent of these roles that emerged. However, there are other DevOps-related job titles, including site reliability engineer and cloud engineer. 

The core responsibilities associated with DevOps roles center on releasing quality code quickly, reliably and frequently; facilitating collaboration between teams; and optimising feedback loops. Automating processes is emphasised across the board, as well as adopting lean management practices and minimising risk.

While there can be variations in the mix of duties across companies, we cover some typical responsibilities performed by a person who provides DevOps engineering services in the next sections. 

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Collaboration

• Fostering partnerships between development, QA and operations teams for improved communications and transparency.
• Evangelizing DevOps philosophies, practices and tools throughout the organisation.
• Identifying and communicating existing bottlenecks, inefficiencies and issues affecting product quality or release schedules.
• Providing guidance and mentoring to development and operations teams to adhere to optimal procedures and processes.

Automation

• Building and maintaining automation pipelines and workflows (via CI/CD solutions like Jenkins, Bamboo, etc.).
• Creating automated scripts for testing and deployment processes.
• Developing, managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure and services.
• Containerizing applications and managing container clusters and registries.
• Automating security controls and configuration management.
• Writing code to automate repetitive tasks. 

Monitoring and Optimization

• Instrumenting applications for monitoring and logging.
• Integrating and analysing application performance metrics and logs using tools like Splunk, Nagios or AppDynamics.
• Performing routine audits to ensure quality, reliability and security standards are upheld.
• Tuning and scaling systems for optimal performance and efficiency.
• Helping teams establish effective metrics based on business goals.
• Identifying technical debt and minimizing its impact.

Process Improvement

• Performing root cause analysis on defects and outages to prevent recurrences.
• Building feedback loops so development teams learn quickly from incidents.
• Developing policies, procedures and training programmes conducive to a DevOps culture.
• Analysing the effectiveness of development cycles and operations procedures.
• Working with individual teams to define and optimize their processes.
• Aligning IT workflows and objectives with business goals.

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Essential DevOps Engineer Skills

Succeeding as a DevOps engineer requires both hard and soft skills. Technical expertise is crucial for automating and optimising workflows, as well as architecting infrastructure and monitoring systems. So, which tools and technologies are most often used by DevOps teams and engineers? 

Linux – 26%

Docker – 25%

Terraform – 19%

AWS – 17%

Bash – 13%

Equally important is understanding different team dynamics and setting up processes for effective collaboration and innovation. 

Here are some of the most important skills for DevOps engineers:

Cloud & Infrastructure – Expertise with popular cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to provision infrastructure on demand. Understanding infrastructure as code concepts with Terraform, CloudFormation, etc. 

CI/CD – Deep knowledge with continuous integration/continuous delivery tools like Jenkins, CircleCI and TravisCI to automate testing and releases. Experience setting up and maintaining CI/CD pipelines. 

Code & Scripting – Programming experience with common languages like JavaScript/Node.js, Python, GoLang and Ruby to help build integrations, automation and tooling. Bash scripting skills are also important. 

Monitoring & Observability – Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics and Nagios. Also, have experience with log aggregation software like Splunk and Elastic. 

Collaboration – Ability to influence development, operations and testing teams to adopt optimal procedures. Organisational skills to facilitate collaboration through status meetings, demos, documentation, etc. 

Culture & Process – Knowledge of Agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban to implement efficient development workflows. Experience establishing DevOps cultures and best practices across teams.

Security & Compliance – Knowledge of security practices like secrets management, infrastructure hardening, auditing configurations and access controls. Understanding of compliance needs and regulations.

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DevOps Engineer Roles and Responsibilities

Now let’s take a more in-depth look at typical DevOps roles and responsibilities, which may vary across different companies depending on team structures and technologies used: 

Own Code Deployments

• Facilitate code deployments and continuous delivery workflows.
• Configure deployment pipelines with testing, staging and production environments.
• Integrate code repositories, build servers, testing frameworks and production infrastructure.
• Implement progressive delivery patterns to release features safely without downtime.
• Utilise infrastructure as code tools to provision cloud resources consistently.
• Follow infrastructure hardening checklists covering authentication, encryption, auditing, etc.
• Document deployment processes, including rollback procedures.
• Troubleshoot deployment issues, failed jobs and infrastructure outages.

Automate Processes

• Build process automation across development, testing and deployment activities.
• Create scripts to handle repeatable tasks like environment builds, database migrations and application configuration.
• Set up the automated unit, integration and end-to-end testing workflows.
• Automate and customize configuration management using Ansible, Chef, Puppet or SaltStack.
• Containerize services using Docker and orchestrate containers with Kubernetes or Amazon ECS.
• Develop continuous integration workflows with Jenkins, CircleCI or other CI/CD technologies.

Instrument Applications

• Work with developers to integrate logging, monitoring and alerting capabilities.
• Set up log aggregation solutions like Splunk or Elastic to centralise application logs.
• Configure monitoring tools such as Datadog, New Relic or AppDynamics to gain visibility into system health and application performance.
• Build custom scripts and dashboards tailored to application metrics and business KPIs.
• Set up notifications so teams are alerted to indicators of problems or degraded user experience.
• Ensure security controls are implemented following best practices for secrets management, network security, access controls, etc.

Optimize Performance

• Perform load and performance tests to establish benchmarks and validate capacity planning.
• Monitor system performance metrics and troubleshoot bottlenecks or slowdowns.
• Tune Linux systems for optimal utilisation of resources — CPU, memory, disk, network, etc.
• Horizontally scale-out services to accommodate increases in traffic and usage.
• Set up auto-scaling groups to dynamically add/remove servers based on load.
• Continually evaluate new technologies and cloud services to improve architecture.

Support Security and Compliance

• Perform security audits of environments, configurations, user access controls and permissions.
• Execute vulnerability scans and remediation for deployed systems.
• Validate that all systems adhere to security best practices related to encryption, authentication, secrets management, etc.
• Ensure infrastructure and services comply with relevant regulations and standards.
• Develop and oversee security policies, procedures and training.
• Investigate security breaches or other incidents and refine procedures accordingly.

Foster Collaboration

• Encourage a culture of empathy, respect and trust between teams.
• Facilitate collaboration through status meetings, demos, documentation, goal setting and idea-sharing.
• Identify and troubleshoot process bottlenecks causing friction between teams.
• Provide guidance to help teams optimise their workflows and adopt healthy engineering practices.
• Develop communications channels for teams to discuss work in progress and roadblocks.
• Educate teams on DevOps principles via brown bag talks and team-specific training. 

Evangelize DevOps

• Develop business case for DevOps transformation and outline benefits to leadership.
• Create presentations explaining DevOps, automation needs, toolchain ecosystem, etc.
• Arrange demos showcasing capabilities of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, etc.
• Provide coaching and mentoring for individuals/teams new to DevOps practices.
• Document processes, architecture decisions, style guides, runbooks and other tribal knowledge.
• Promote the importance of experimentation, failure tolerance and blameless culture.

Own Continuous Improvement

• Measure the effectiveness of development cycles, operations procedures and processes.
• Perform root cause analysis on defects, production issues and other failures to prevent recurrences.
• Help teams establish meaningful and measurable metrics based on business goals.
• Identify technical debt causing engineering slowdowns and work to minimize accumulated debt.
• Evaluate new technologies and tools to help optimize workflows.
• Automate manual processes that are error-prone or time-consuming.
• Level-up skills through certifications, conferences, reading books/blogs and self-study.

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Wrap Up

DevOps continues to evolve, as will the associated roles and responsibilities. However, DevOps engineers should always prioritise improving cycle times, fostering collaboration between teams, and optimising feedback loops. They help instill a culture that allows development and operations teams to thrive while accelerating the delivery of innovation.