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DevOps has changed the course of the IT industry in many ways. It is a revolutionary approach that wipes out the inefficiencies of the traditional methods and brings in new levels of productivity and efficiency. The world is racing towards DevOps and many business giants like Amazon, Netflix, Etsy, Target have already incorporated DevOps in their organizations.
Even though DevOps has been in the information technology industry for a very short duration, it has evolved and updated immensely. Therefore, it has become mandatory for people looking for a job in this field to improve and refine their skills as per the requirements of the market.
What is DevOps?
In traditional methods, the development team first develops the code and then has to wait for weeks to get their codes deployed and tested. This leads to an imbalance between the old code that is yet to be deployed and the new code to be developed. The operations team on the other hand, when tests the code may find some errors mainly because the development environment and the production environment are quite different making it seem like the developers didn’t do their work well.
To overcome this difficulty, DevOps allows the collaboration of software development and operations departments. DevOps is focused on the ability to grow and help the company grow and evolve as per the requirements of the market. DevOps is an ultra-modern approach in the IT industry that brings together software development and IT operations. By doing so, the need to repeat the process from the first step in different departments is eliminated. The two departments work together aiming to reduce the system development life cycle and ensure continuous delivery.
It should be noted here that, DevOps doesn’t mean eliminating one department and merging both the departments into one to minimize the cost of the company. Both the departments retain their identities and work together with the wall between them diminished. This leads to early detection and solving of any problems occurring during development. By applying a combined approach, the time required is drastically reduced and major faults are recognized and rectified at the earliest adding to the efficiency.
Why DevOps?
Following is a brief description of why DevOps online training has gained so much popularity and why more and more companies are incorporating DevOps in their business approach.
- Speed: DevOps approach frees up hours spent in deploying the codes.
- Efficiency: The bugs can be detected and rectified more efficiently with both the teams working together.
- Continuous delivery: DevOps ensures continuous product delivery to the market.
- Enhanced quality: With automation of most processes, more time is spent on ensuring and improving the quality of the product.
- Teamwork: DevOps enables better team synchronization between the development and operations teams. In some cases, the security team is also integrated closely with the DevOps team.
- Cost-effective: with more efficient products and less time consumed, the overall cost is reduced.
What is the role of a DevOps professional?
A DevOps professional can perform a lot of different functions based on the company they work in. The term ‘DevOps engineer’ refers to someone who works with the development team and IT professionals and supervises their work. In this sense, one does not have to be an engineer, to be called a ‘DevOps engineer.’ The typical roles and responsibilities of a DevOps engineer can be explained as:
- Designing CI/CD pipelines
- Ensuring post-release product stability
- Ensuring product quality
- Monitoring product security and health
- Ensuring the implementation of DevOps
- Managing the automation of tools
- Working with the development team in developing and testing the code.
How to improve my DevOps skills?
DevOps course requires in-depth knowledge combined with proficiency in the skills. Hence, if you are looking forward to a future in DevOps, these are some basic and crucial skills that you must practice and acquire proficiency in:
- CI/CD tools: one of the main works of a DevOps engineer is to design continuous integration/continuous deployment pipelines. Therefore, the importance of CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Travis CI, GoCD cannot be stressed enough.
- GIT: a strong proficiency in GIT is a must as it is used a lot as a DevOps professional. So, practice GIT commands appropriately.
- A very strong grasp and knowledge of Linux is a must-have.
- Mastery in configuration management tools like puppet, Ansible, CFEngine, etc.
One of the key points to be noted here is that over the years, even though the essential skills are mostly the same, the level of proficiency asked in these skills has changed drastically. Therefore, a thorough knowledge combined with the perfect set of skills is necessary.
Conclusion:
DevOps is a rapidly evolving field. It is the prime time to invest efforts in learning and mastering the required skills to increase your chances of getting hired.
