Ten things you need to know before starting a career in DevOps

So you’re considering a shift to DevOps, Forbes recently reported that highly skilled DevOps specialists with just a high school degree earn a median salary of $106,734. A recent study of IT salaries revealed that 46% of companies plan on hiring DevOps in the coming year.

The DevOps space is red hot but here’s the skills you need, and what you should expect to encounter, in a career in DevOps.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a culture shift or a movement that encourages great communication and collaboration (aka teamwork) to foster building better-quality software more quickly with more reliability.

It is also an automation process that allows quick, safe and high quality software development and release while keeping all the stakeholders in the loop.

What DevOps is not

DevOps is not a person, a role, or a title. You are not a DevOps engineer, even though you may call yourself one. DevOps is not about using a specific set of tools and it most definitely is not about renaming your Ops team the DevOps team.

Understand continuous delivery

Continuous delivery is an automated process for building software that expedites its release. It allows you to deploy a feature or upgrade rapidly, and with minimum manual intervention. The goal is more frequent, and far less risky small changes, to get dramatically faster and more focused feedback.

The ability to communicate is a must

Sharing and empathy is central in DevOps as it is in life. Knowledge not shared with the team is useless and will just create a bottleneck. Empathy for everyone on the team and their tasks is also crucial. You must have empathy for the challenges that each role brings to create a harmonies workplace.

Bring a wide business understanding

A DevOps specialist must be able to see the big picture in terms of processes, needs, and constraints. You have to be very familiar with all sides; Development, Operations, Sales, Product, etc. and you must know how they all work together to achieve the organizations goals.

Be prepared for late nights

DevOps means becoming ever more agile and responding to a client’s needs in real time. Critical events often occur in large and complicated systems. Hence, don’t be shocked if you get a 2 am call in the case of a crises.

Questions you can expect to be asked in an interview

According to Mike Baukes, if the interviewer wants to make sure you understand the framework you’ll be working with, they may ask “how does HTTP work? How does a web page appear in a browser?” Baukes advises that you may get a question like “How would you prepare for a migration from one platform to another?”, “Tell me about the worst-run/best-run outage you’ve been a part of. What made it bad/well-run?” or “What is the purpose of a post-mortem meeting?” and “Do you know how to learn from mistakes?”

Programs you need to know

Learn tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Chef and Puppe. It is well worth doing it on your own time and with your own dime, hands-on experience with actual tools and projects and an understanding of best practices can be more valuable than a college degree.

What you need to know about operations

If you’re coming from the developer side, obsessively get involved in everything your team does involving operations — deployment, scale, etc. If your team doesn’t do any of that for any number of reason, go over to the operations team and sit in on a few deployments.

Understand the databases role

Your database holds your companies most valuable asset, you must understand how the database and DBAs fit into the DevOps process so that the database does not become the weak link holding back the entire application development.

Ultimately DevOps is knowledge, concepts and best practices. It gives an edge to every developer or operations who practices it over those who don’t. It might not be something to do as a full time job, but any developer with DevOps experience will find themselves at the focal point in any organization striving to improve its processes, and hence position themselves to climb the ladder quicker.