Day to Day activities for a DevOps

1. Make sure that the pipeline is running smoothly 

This is one of a DevOps engineer's most important tasks to ensure that the CI/CD pipeline is intact and fixing any issue or failure with it is the #1 priority for the day. They often need to spend time on troubleshooting, analysing and providing fixes to problems.

2. Interaction with other teams – Coordination and collaboration are the keys for DevOps to succeed; hence, daily integration with Dev and QA team, Program Management, and IT is always required.

3. Work on Automation Backlog – Automation is the soul of DevOps so DevOps engineering needs to plan it out and I can see DevOps engineers spending lots of time behind the keyboard working on Automating stuff on daily basis.

4. Infrastructure Management – DevOps engineer are also responsible for maintaining and managing the infrastructure required for CI/CD pipeline and making sure that it's up and running and being used optimally is also part of their daily schedule. Working on Backup, High Availability, New Platform setup etc.

5. Dealing with Legacy stuff – Not everyone is lucky to work on the latest and newest things and DevOps engineers are no exception hence they also need to spend time on legacy i.e. in terms of supporting it or migrating to the latest.

6. Exploration – DevOps leverage a lot from the available various tools, there are many options as open source so the team need to regularly check on this to make sure the adoptions are as required, this is something which also requires some effort not on a daily but regular basis. What are open source options available to keep the cost at a minimum?

7. Removing bottleneck – DevOps primary purpose is to identify the bottlenecks / Manual handshakes and work with everyone involved (Dev / QA and all other stakeholders) to remove them so the team spend good amount of time in finding such things and build a Automation Backlog using this.

8. Documentation – Though Agile / DevOps stresses less on the documentation, it is still the important one that DevOps engineer does daily, Be it Server Information, Daily Week charted, Scrum / Kanban board or Simple steps to configure / backup or modify the infrastructure, you need to spend a good amount of time in coming up these artifacts.

.9. Training and Self Development – Self-leaning and Training are very useful in getting a better understanding and many organizations encourage their employee to take the time out and do some of these and same holds true for DevOps folks as well, So learn something new everyday.

10. Continuous Improvement as Practice – Last but not least, It’s up to the DevOps folks to build awareness of the potential of CI/CD and DevOps practices and building a culture of leveraging it for doing things better, reducing re-work, increasing productivity and optimizing the use of existing resources.