What are the key skills and tools for a successful devops and CI engineer?

1 Devops and CI overview

Devops is a culture and a set of practices that aim to bridge the gap between development and operations teams. It focuses on automation, collaboration, and feedback loops. Continuous integration (CI) is a key devops practice that involves merging code changes frequently and running automated tests to ensure quality and consistency. CI helps to detect and fix errors early, and to deliver software faster and more reliably.

2 Devops and CI skills

A devops and CI engineer needs to have a broad range of technical and soft skills, such as coding and scripting proficiency in at least one programming language, the ability to write and run automated tests, familiarity with cloud platforms and services, and the capacity to communicate effectively and collaborate with other teams and stakeholders. Common languages and tools used in devops and CI include Python, Ruby, Bash, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Jenkins, Travis CI, Selenium, JUnit, Logstash, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. Additionally, communication and collaboration tools such as Slack, GitHub, Jira, and Trello are often used.

3 Devops and CI tools

There are many tools available for devops and CI, and each one has its own features and benefits. Jenkins is an open-source platform for continuous integration and delivery, allowing users to create pipelines, run tests, deploy code, and integrate with other tools and services. Docker is an open-source tool that enables the creation, running, and distribution of applications using containers. Kubernetes is an open-source system for managing and orchestrating containerized applications, helping to scale, update, and monitor applications across clusters of nodes. Git is an open-source distributed version control system for managing code changes, allowing users to track, review, and merge code changes, and collaborate with other developers. All of these tools help to simplify and standardize the development and deployment process, ensure portability and compatibility across platforms, improve the availability, performance, and security of applications, and automate and optimize the use of resources.

5 Devops and CI best practices

To achieve the best results from devops and CI, it is important to follow some best practices and principles. These include adopting a devops culture, implementing CI pipelines, using version control, testing early and often, and monitoring and measuring. Devops is not only a set of tools and techniques, but also a mindset and culture that requires a shift in roles and responsibilities, and a commitment to collaboration and communication. CI pipelines are workflows that automate and orchestrate the integration and delivery process, while version control is a system that tracks and manages the changes and history of the code. Testing helps to ensure the functionality and usability of the software, while monitoring and measuring help to evaluate and improve the quality and reliability of the software.