Essential DevOps Engineer Skills for a Successful Tech Career

Who Is A DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps engineer is a tech professional who connects the gap between software development and IT operations. DevOps engineers should know and understand DevOps tools. A career as DevOps engineer includes working with various tools to implement continuous integration and deployment.

What Does a DevOps Engineer Do?

A DevOps engineer is an integral part of an organisation that plays multiple roles, such as:

• Focuses on automating the software development and deployment process

• Ensuring a smooth flow of the software development cycle

• Collaborates with development operations, QA, security and other teams

• Develops and maintains CI/CD pipelines

• Automation of tasks

• Overseeing system performance

Key DevOps Engineer Skills

To be effective and successful in the role of a DevOps engineer, a professional must have a combination of technical and soft skills. Here are the key skills to become DevOps engineer that aspirants can develop.

Hard Skills For a DevOps Engineer

Hard skills for a DevOps engineer mean specific abilities and qualities that enable DevOps engineers to perform their tasks and responsibilities effectively. These DevOps Engineer skills are typically learned through work experience, education and training. Important Hard DevOps engineer skills include:

1. Coding proficiency

As a DevOps engineer, coding is an integral part of the role, and proficiency in multiple programming languages is important. Learning the following programming languages can be highly beneficial for the role of a DevOps Engineer.

• HTML

• JavaScript

• Ruby

• Shell Scripting (Bash, Zsh)

• Python

2. Knowledge of DevOps tools And Technologies

A DevOps engineer needs to have good experience and proficiency in various DevOps. It is one of the most important DevOps engineer skills to be familiar with tools from different categories, such as,

• Version Control:Git

• Configuration Management: Ansible, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack

• Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager

• Testing Automation: Selenium, Cucumber, JUnit

3. Knowledge of Cloud Computing

A DevOps engineer is responsible for developing efficient, scalable and secure application deployments. To do this, a DevOps engineer must be familiar with cloud computing. Knowledge in major cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or AWS is highly beneficial for a DevOps engineer role and is one of the essential DevOps engineer skills

Important Soft DevOps engineer skills

Along with technical abilities, Soft skills are also a must-have for DevOps engineers to perform efficiently. Important DevOps engineer skills are as follows,

1. Collaboration and Teamwork

For a DevOps engineer, working and collaborating with different teams, including development, operations, QA, business units and security, is an important aspect. Communicating effectively with multiple teams is one of the important soft skills required for DevOps engineer positions.

2. Strong Communication Skills

Communication skills are a central aspect of any role. To a DevOps engineer, the ability to communicate technical ideas, timelines, risks and priorities clearly and effectively is crucial. These are among the most valuable skills to become DevOps engineer, helping professionals with:

• Clear documentation and status updation

• Explaining complex technical ideas to non-technical team members.

• Resolving conflicts effectively

3. Adaptability

Quickly adapting to challenging environments and being flexible are great qualities for a DevOps engineer role. The work setting of a DevOps engineer is constantly evolving. Therefore, updating with new technologies is a fundamental requirement for a DevOps engineer.

DevOps Engineer Salary in India

The DevOps engineer salary in India depends greatly on different factors such as experience, qualification and specialisations of the candidate. In India, a DevOps engineer with 2 to 6 years of experience in the industry can earn around Rs 3.8 Lakhs - 16 Lakhs per year. While considering the monthly salary of a DevOps engineer in India, they receive Rs 50,000 - 51,000 on average.

(Salary source: Ambitionbox)

Conclusion

A DevOps engineer is a career path that is not only in demand but is constantly growing. To succeed in this field, each DevOps engineer should develop a strong understanding of relevant skills. The demand for DevOps engineers will only continue to grow as organisations are seeking professionals to catalyse innovations and improve system reliability.