A Journey of DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer is a paradigm that needs to have a diverse set of skills and the will to take on daily distractions that threaten Production stability.

Before I get into my understanding of the Journey of a DevOps engineer, I would like to brief my background in this journey. Back then, I was handling an Operations team that had core application and platform support. Based on our nature of work, we had an opportunity to transform the Operations team into a DevOps team. During the progress, one of my major tasks is to transform my current operations members to take up the DevOps engineer role.

The approach involves priority and categorization of current concerns we had as a team and we interrupted the important aspect of DevOps is automation, investigation, streamlining the process, stability, security, and communication.

A few activities were already part of the Operations scope was.,

• High frequency of releases/deployments into production (multiple per day, hour, etc.)
• Automated infrastructure and system administration tasks

The idea to transform operations engineer into DevOps engineer is an outgrowth of Agile Infrastructure, the concept gained a lot of traction, and I enjoyed its popularity in the space. We encouraged our operations engineers to self-learn and instructor lead pieces of training as well in the topics. The challenges were to reduce the current operations workload but honestly, the operations engineer initially felt a bit overloaded, and once they start enjoying the learning of cutting-edge technologies, the team adapted quickly. The lesson learned was the team need to be in sync when you plan for such a transformation.

All the operations team engineers were 2+ years of experience in application development and support. It was easy for them to adapt and understand the concepts.

From here, I will share the set of skills required to be a DevOps engineer. Not necessary for you to be a ‘Pro’ but should have the knowledge to understand/question/troubleshoot in the areas.

1. Start learning Programming language, you must be already doing this, but finding the real-time scripts would be challenging for learning. Encourage yourself to implement the legacy code with the latest ones, this will be good practice for you to understand the concepts.
2. Being in the Operations/Support team, you must know the Server Administration, it is very important to understand the concepts. If you know either one, try to compare and explore other Operating Systems. 
3. The Network and Security, are crucial in understanding the rules/restrictions based on organization policies. Helps in planning the security features from the Design phase of development itself.  
4. Knowledge of Servers is necessary to understand the behavior of the Web servers where your application is going to be implemented. Further, understand how Cache and Database Servers plan accordingly. 
5. Get trained to have Infrastructure as Code. This means understanding configuration management, Container, Container Orchestration, and Infrastructure Provisioning.
6. The major concept in the journey of a DevOps engineer is to learn CI/CD. Continuous integration/continuous delivery is a set of processes that help software development teams deliver code changes more frequently and reliably. Also helps shorten the software development lifecycle.
7. Monitoring is a diagnostic tool used for alerting DevOps to system-related issues by analyzing metrics. Logging is a method of tracking and storing data to ensure application availability and assess the impact of state transformations on performance.
8. Understanding Clouds will be a crucial part of the journey. But there are simplified multiple courses, and guides available online to learn on the job. The cloud is one of those bits of technology that aids in just about every step of a successful DevOps operation. Cloud computing enables collaboration without all the downtime of sending files back and forth to team members.

Refer to the Cheat sheet describes the bits of technology that aid in just about every step of a successful DevOps operation. There is no limit to learning about different concepts of DevOps, and I hope the article helps you fulfill your dreams of becoming a DevOps Engineer.