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How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

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Are you a Web Developer looking to switch up your career and adopt the DevOps approach? Do you work in Web Operations and would like to understand what this DevOps hype is all about? Are you neither, but have spent some time working in the technology industry and want to build a new career for yourself?

DevOps really is one of the fastest growing careers in the IT landscape right now. DevOps can be a complicated philosophy to some, however it can be understood as the aim to automate organisational IT Infrastructure, while deploying and managing new system frameworks.

The DevOps career path is not only one of the most profitable, it is seen as one of most satisfying career branches in Information Technology today. It can be a long road to become a veteran DevOps Engineer, but it’s totally worth it!

If you are interested in pursuing a career in DevOps and don’t know where to start - here’s your go-to-guide to the DevOps Framework, why DevOps jobs are in-demand, the responsibilities, benefits and challenges of a DevOps Engineer and common interview questions.

Finally, if you have been practicing DevOps for a while now, you might still find this article useful as validation and use it to remind yourself why you chose the DevOps way of life.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

What Is DevOps?

DevOps is not a framework or a workflow, it’s a culture which is taking over the business World.

In many organisations, Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) have misaligned objectives. Dev is often measured by the number of new features released, whereas Ops is measured by 100% uptime. What is the sure-fire way to get 100% uptime? You don’t ever introduce any new features or make any changes.

I bet you are thinking “How do we keep up with the demand for new features and technologies, while maintaining stability and high performance?” Well, DevOps is the answer! DevOps allows companies to focus on what truly matters, how to deliver maximum value to both customers and stakeholders.

How do you successfully start a DevOps transformation? You can use the DevOps “CALMS” model… The “CALMS” model is an abbreviation, which stands for:

C = Culture

Create a culture of collaboration and ownership within the organisation.

A = Automation

Allow information to guide your decisions and get quick feedback utilising automation.

L = Lean IT

Move towards the Lean IT way of thinking and understand the difference between being busy and being valuable.

M = Measurement

Learn how to be empirical and let statistics guide, but not at the expense of culture.

S = Sharing

Share your goals with others to create purpose and talk about your experiences to encourage learning within the organisation.

With DevOps, changes can make it to production faster, resources are easier to share, and large-scale systems are both easier to manage and maintain. The power of DevOps can only be fully realised when the organisation embraces the values and principles of DevOps.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

Why Is DevOps So Important?

There is unprecedented consumer demand, customers want it now and are better informed than ever before. We all need to quickly learn how to become more responsive to:

• Customer Demands

• Legislative Demands

• Industry Shifts

• New Technologies & Innovations

DevOps and Agile practices will enable us to be hyper-responsive through:

• Reducing time to market.

• Improving reliability, security, quality and performance.

• Fostering a culture of innovation and excellence at every step.

The DevOps Research Assessment (DORA) concluded that the teams who adopted DevOps practices benefited from less deployment pain and burnout as well as faster releases, with both speed and stability that statistically impact business performance.

So, high performance IT powers high-performance business.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

Why Are DevOps Jobs In-Demand?

The demand for Engineers, Developers, and Architects in DevOps is rising,

The demand for DevOps Engineers, Developers and Architects is rising and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. Businesses need DevOps Engineers badly and this is due to the fact that they are now pressed to build high-quality applications as swiftly as possible to keep up with competition and create innovative solutions to address challenges in a quick and continuous manner. DevOps can set the ball rolling for you—and you keep it going without fail.

What Is A DevOps Engineer?

To be honest, DevOps Engineers are a pretty elite group of professionals. A DevOps Engineer works alongside Developer and IT staff to oversee code releases.

Basically, the DevOps Engineer is a professional who understand the Software Development lifecycle and is knowledgeable about various automation tools for developing digital pipelines.

There are also some different job titles for DevOps Engineer:

• DevOps Evangelist

• Release Manager

• Automation Expert

• Build Engineer

• Reliability Engineer

• Platform Engineer

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

What Does A DevOps Engineer Do?

DevOps isn’t some kind of sorcery, but it may look like it from the outside. The role of DevOps Engineer was created out of the need of organisations to fully embrace cloud infrastructure in a dedicated, multi-tenant and hybrid environment.

Here are the key responsibilities for a DevOps Engineer:

• Analyse current technology utilised within the company and develop steps and processes to improve and expand upon them

• Establish milestones for necessary contributions from departments and develop processes to facilitate their collaboration

• Assist other department engineers in creating practical demonstrations of proposed solutions and demonstrating them to other members of the team

• Provide detailed specifications for proposed solutions including materials, manpower and time necessary

• Provide clear goals for all areas of a project and develop steps to oversee their timely execution

• Work closely with engineering professionals within the company to maintain hardware and software needed for projects to be completed efficiently

• Mentor and train other engineers throughout the company and seek to continually improve processes companywide

• Work alongside project management teams to successfully monitor progress and implementation of initiatives

A DevOps career requires the ambition to be a skilled communicator, especially a skilled listener. DevOps also calls for a willingness to push for positive change.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

What Tech Skills Do DevOps Engineer’s Need To Have?

DevOps Engineers require a variety of technical skills in order to become successful. If you want to become a DevOps Engineer, then you should have a broad knowledge of the following technologies (including DevOps):

• Agile Project Management

• Open Source OS

• Cloud Technology (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OpenStack)

• Container Concepts (LXD, Docker)

• Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Bamboo, VSTS)

• Deployment Automation & Orchestration

• Infrastructure Automation (Puppet, Chef, Ansible)

• Orchestration (Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm)

• Source Control (Git, Bitbucket, VSTS)

To put it broadly, to become a DevOps Engineers, you will need to have experience in Software Development, Deployments and Systems Operations Management.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

What Soft Skills Do DevOps Engineer’s Need To Have?

Besides from hard, technical skills – a DevOps Engineer should also have the ability to collaborate, multi-task and always put the customer at the forefront of everything you do.

Here are the soft-skills that every DevOps Engineer should possess:

Customer First Mindset

A great DevOps Engineer always cares about delivering value to customers or the end-user and want to understand how and why they do what they do.

Flexibility

The ability to remain calm in stressful situations, juggle fluid workloads and be flexible is important to your success in a DevOps Engineer role.

Think Of The Wider Objective

DevOps combined the needs and wants of a multi-disciplinary teams and applications and a DevOps Engineer cannot lose sight of the wider objective at enterprise level.

Communication & Collaboration

A true DevOps Engineer must be able to communicate effectively with stakeholders and different teams and build a strategy to implement culture shifts within the organisation.

Make Decisions

In a busy and sometimes chaotic environment, a DevOps Engineer has to make decisions quickly, whilst keeping in mind the bigger goals. It is an extremely desirable soft skills, which employers are looking for when it comes to hiring DevOps Engineers.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

5 Challenges Of DevOps Adoption & How To Overcome Them:

As DevOps becomes mainstream and you may be asking yourself “Where do I start with DevOps adoption? And what challenges will I face along the way?” Don’t worry, we are going to help you resolve some of these challenges today.

1. Culture

Solution: Companies must focus on building a collaborative culture with shared objectives. This also includes hiring or promoting employees to become DevOps champions within the business.

2. Allocate Budget

Solution: Enterprises need to remember that open source in no way means free and must factor in integration and operational complexity in costs.

3. Manage Environments

Solution: Organisations can standardise and automate complex DevOps environments using cloud sandboxes and other tools.

4. No DevOps Strategy

Solution: Businesses should develop a clear DevOps strategy with milestones, project owners and well-defined deliverables. DevOps is about connecting Development and Operation Teams for Agile, rapid, customer-centric deployments.

5. Inadequate Skill Sets

Solution: Both Development and Operations Team require formal training on DevOps to ensure Best Practice and establish common operational procedures.

Purple Griffon offer easy and affordable DevOps online training courses, where you can become certified from the comfort of your own home or office within days:

BCS DevOps Foundation Online

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

Why Become A DevOps Engineer?

Do you have a thirst for knowledge and the drive to make a lasting impact in your role? Good! It sounds like the role of DevOps Engineer would be perfect for you. Here are a few perks to moving into a DevOps career:

Future-Proof Your Career

As DevOps continues to revolutionise modern business technology, there is high demand for DevOps experts and it is a great time for you to forge a sustainable career in the industry.

High Earning Potential

The average DevOps Engineer salary in UK is £60,000 per year. Entry level positions start at £30,000 per year while most experienced workers can make up to £90,000 per year.

Learning Opportunities

A career as a DevOps Engineers allows you to deploy a broad set of skills, which you are constantly refining due to new challenges to solve every day. There are countless opportunities for learning, development and personal growth.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In A 9 Months Or Less...

Unfortunately, the career path to become a DevOps Engineer is not clearly defined.

DevOps professionals can come from several IT background and start the role at different points in their career. These professionals are typically Developers, Network Operations or System Admins with a passion for coding and move to DevOps to improve the planning of tests and deployment.

If you are looking to land a DevOps Engineer position, then we would advise that you expand your skills and experience for the role by perfecting your coding skills (HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc) , become familiar with automation tools and find projects or roles that will allow you to exercise soft skills like leadership and collaboration in teams.

The best place to start is to become DevOps Foundation certified and prove to potential employers that you understand the core values of DevOps.

BCS DevOps Foundation Online

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

What Are Common DevOps Engineer Interview Questions?

Do you need to prepare for a DevOps Engineer interview? Well, the future is yours! Use these common DevOps Engineer interview questions and answers to your advantage and impress your interviewer. Alternatively, you can also use these questions to hire DevOps champions at your organisation.

1. Explain DevOps

• DevOps promotes communication and collaboration between business, development & operations teams. In a way, we are talking about unification.

• DevOps is not only about tools but also about involving people and processes.

• DevOps is inspired by the Agile process.

• DevOps is about automating the development, release and operation processes.

• DevOps helps in the speed of delivering applications to the end-users.

• DevOps is also about continuous improvement which helps in learning through feedback.

2. What is the difference between CI and CD?

CI stands for Continuous Integration and CD stands for Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment. CI is the foundation of both Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment. Continuous Delivery and continuous deployment automate releases whereas CI only automates the build.

While Continuous Delivery aims at producing software that can be released at any time, releases to production are still done manually at someone’s decision. Continuous Deployment goes one step further and actually releases these components to production systems.

3. How is DevOps different from Agile?

DevOps is a culture that allows the development and the operations team to work together. This results in continuous development, testing, integration, deployment, and monitoring of the software throughout the lifecycle.

Agile is a software development methodology that focuses on iterative, incremental, small, and rapid releases of software, along with customer feedback. It addresses gaps and conflicts between the customer and developers.

4. Explain a few prerequisites that are useful for DevOps implementation.

• Commitment at the senior level in the organisation.

• Need for change to be communicated across the organisation.

• Version control software.

• Automated tools for compliance to process.

• Automated Testing

• Automated Deployment

5. What are the key components of DevOps?

• Continuous Integration

• Continuous Testing

• Continuous Delivery

• Continuous Monitoring

6. What are 10 DevOps tools used in organisations today?

• Jira

• GIT/SVN

• Bitbucket

• Jenkins

• Bamboo

• SonarQube

• Artifactory/Nexus

• Docker

• Chef / Puppet /Ansible

• IBM Urbancode Deploy / CA-RA

• Nagios / Splunk

7. What are your expectations from a career in DevOps?

To be involved in the end to end delivery process and the most important aspect of helping to improve the process so as to enable the development and operations teams to work together and understand each other’s point of view.

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

How Much Have You Learned? Find Out With Our Free Online DevOps & DevSecOps Quiz

How much do you know about DevOps? DevOps is a set of practices that combines Development and Operations to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Test your knowledge with our 10-question DevOps Mini Quiz

DevOps Quiz

How much do you know about DevOps and Security? DevSecOps is the philosophy of integrating security practices within the DevOps process. DevSecOps involves creating a 'Security as Code' culture with ongoing, flexible collaboration between release engineers and security teams. Find out if you have what it takes to remove barriers between DevOps and security to achieve business goals without friction with our 12-question DevSecOps Mini Quiz.

DevSecOps Quiz

How To Become A DevOps Engineer In 9 Months Or Less…

Did you find our ‘How To Become A DevOps Engineer’ blog article helpful? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

About The Author

Lois McConnachie

Lois McConnachie

I have been working at Purple Griffon for a total of 8 years. In my role as Senior Sales Executive, I always strive to deliver a high standard of customer service, which forms the basis of all of my interactions with customers, both old and new. I believe that fostering positive relationships and understanding customer needs are essential for providing effective training solutions. In my personal time, I enjoy relaxing with my Fiancé, drinking iced coffee and watching too much anime.

Tel: +44 (0)1539 736 828

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