Jumping into DevOps– Who can Start & Where to Start?

DevOps is a demanding job role. It speeds-up a company’s process of software creation, without making development and operation teams exhaustive. Meanwhile, customer value is delivered as expected.?

But how does DevOps make software development efficient? What are the skills of a DevOps engineer? And who can start a career in DevOps?

The author has explored the above queries and more, to help IT personnel jump into a DevOps career.?

What does a DevOps engineer do?

A DevOps engineer automates and manages the software creation process (aka SDLC).?

They have a unique set of skills that lets them perform DevOps specific tasks– integrating new code changes, running tests, and managing the deployment process.

Does a DevOps engineer need to have experience in software development?

Though the job role of a DevOps engineer requires to have sound knowledge of software development best practices (also called agile principles), it does not require them to write code for development.?

The job role specifically deals with coordinating with development and operations; and using DevOps toolchain such as Jenkins and GitLab. DevOps coordination exists in the form of tasks such as– integrating code changes, automating test cases on these changes, and providing the right resources to the development team.

Why does a DevOps engineer need to learn programming?

Programming, specifically Object Oriented Programming–OOP is a must skill for DevOps job roles. These languages offer great features such as code reusability, data protection, and scalability, making it simpler for DevOps experts to organize code.?

The OOP related tasks include:

1. In CI/CD tools (such as Jenkins), OOP principles can be used to create pipeline code that is reusable. This pipeline code is made to accomplish the basic DevOps task: automation of the software development life cycle.
2. DevOps engineers are also tasked to design and create code for infrastructure, which are the necessary resources developers require for software creation. By using OOP languages, DevOps create modular, reusable, and scalable infrastructure code, which is now used by developers, omitting the need to acquire infrastructure manually.
3. Additionally, Jenkins functionality can be improved via modifying any plug-ins using OOP (such as Java). This helps to create customized code for tasks such as integrations, automation workflows, or extensions to Jenkins that align with specific project requirements.
4. Moreover, automated test cases are written using OOP languages, which makes it easy to test new code integrations.

Read more in the full article.