5 In-demand DevOps Skills You’ll Need To Succeed
DevOps is a relatively new field within IT, and is a function that sits between what were two traditionally siloed areas: IT operations and software development. Using tools and processes such as agile methodologies and continuous integration and delivery, DevOps is across every phase of a development and operations lifecycle, bringing together the skills, processes, and tools from all areas of an engineering and IT organization.
Because of its unique position, the types of tasks a DevOps works on can be really diverse, meaning this is a career that offers a lot of variety. One day you might be optimizing frontend code, the next day might be about configuring deployment servers on cloud.
That rich skill set, deployed across a set of in-demand technologies such as cloud infrastructure, means that DevOps professionals are in high demand. According to Global Market Insights, the future of the field is bright. In 2019, the size of the DevOps market exceeded $4 billion and it is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 20% to 2026, making it worth $8 billion.
For companies too, implementing a DevOps strategy pays off: In 2021, 83% of IT decision-makers reported implementing DevOps practices to unlock higher business value and in 2020, 99% said DevOps has had a positive impact on their organization, with another 61% saying implementing DevOps helped them produce higher quality deliverables in the same year. A further 49% of companies reported a reduction in time-to-market software and services.
If you’re working in the area already or want to pivot into the field, you’ll need a combination of hard technical skills, soft skills – DevOps evangelists who can rally a team, and cross-communicate across a business are absolutely a thing – and hybrid abilities in order to do the job. But like all tech roles, the skillset is ever changing, and what was in demand last year might not be so relevant now. There are always new things to learn: here are the top skills you’ll need to succeed in 2023.
1. Good communication skills
This role sits at the fulcrum of two separate areas and as such is designed to cut through the issues that often occur in siloed teams. Your ability to communicate across departments and get teams to collaborate is really important.
2. Usage of relevant tools
A good DevOps will bring order to the work being undertaken, bringing in relevant tools and processes to help with collaboration, reduce context-switching, introduce automation, help teams manage complex environments at scale, and keep engineers in control of the high velocity of tasks.
3. Automation abilities
Leading on from this, DevOps’ need to be aware of the benefits and abilities that can be brought to teams and processes by use of automation. A DevOps engineer should be capable of automating the entire pipeline, including CI/CD cycles, app performance monitoring, infrastructure and configurations, with some of the most popular DevOps automation tools including Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and SaltStack.
4. Coding and scripting
While a DevOps likely won’t spend their days writing code, they will manage updates and releases of new code, so they should be able to write and understand code in popular languages such as Python, Java, JavaScript, and C, PHP, Bash, Shell and Node.js, for example.
5. Customer-Focused Approach
This is another soft skill, but keeping business goals in mind matters. Customer satisfaction is the end goal for a successful process, and a good DevOps will need to keep top of mind that all processes are in line with the overall objectives of the business.
Want to go ahead now and apply for a new DevOps role? We have three below worth a look..
DevOps Engineer, Apple, Austin
At Apple, extraordinary ideas have a way of becoming industry leading products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. As a DevOps Engineer, you will develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines while collaborating across teams to improve build, integration and release process. You’ll push zero-downtime process through continuous delivery practices, rapidly releasing features. Apple is looking for someone who loves digging into details, finding opportunities to improve software delivery, and ensuring quality. Strong fundamentals are expected, and you will partner with quality engineering, security, and development teams to craft solutions. To apply, you’ll need a B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent as well as five-plus years’ of experience working with CI/CD tools like GitHub, Ansible, Jenkins, Maven, SonarQube, and PMD, experience in writing Kubernetes manifest and helm charts and Experience automating AWS Infrastructure as a code using Cloud Formation and Terraform. Get the full brief here.
Senior DevOps Engineer, IBM, Austin
The Senior DevOps Engineer will be tasked with growing the infrastructure as a team. IBM believes in infrastructure as code to reduce deployment risk and, in turn, increase overall speed of change. The company has a background in software development and uses an automated approach to overcome obstacles. You’ll work as a team to decide the best solution to eliminate system toil. To do the job you will need five or more years’ experience in the role of full-time systems/software engineer such as Go, JavaScript, Python or Rust as well as experience in designing, building, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters and the containers. Excellent debugging skills in a Linux environment and experience implementing CI/CD are also required. Get more information here.
Principal DevOps/Sr. Principal DevOps Engineer, Northrop Grumman, Rolling Meadows
Northrop Grumman is seeking a Software DevOps Engineer to be a part of its enterprise-wide digital transformation. Through the use of model-based engineering, DevSecOps and Agile practices it continues to evolve how it delivers critical national defense products and capabilities for the warfighter. You will work in a fast paced agile environment and will deploy CI/CD frameworks that automate code generation, build, test at both the unit and system test levels, release and document code. You’ll also be deploying the solutions in cloud and virtualized environments, developing back end environments for storing testing data and results and developing web-based front end dashboard applications for reporting and analysis. Find full information here.
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