Career in DevOps: Roadmap

The DevOps roadmap covers a lot of concepts within a software development life cycle. DevOps covers the entire software development process from creation onwards. First, you should understand that DevOps is not specific to developers or system engineers. It’s for anyone who is passionate about evolving practices, and technologies and willing to work in a collaborative environment where everything is automated to make everyone’s life so easy.

You can build your career in DevOps even if you are working as a sysadmin, developer, tester, performance engineer, support engineer, etc. This article explains the road map to prepare yourself for the tools and technologies to become a DevOps engineer.

• 1. Learn programming languages.
• 2. Study operating systems.
• 3. Review networking security and protocols.
• 4. Understand Infrastructure as Code.
• 5. Adopt Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment tools.
• 6. Invest in application and infrastructure monitoring.
• 7..Study cloud providers.
• 8. Learn cloud design patterns.

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1. Programming Language and Linux Fundamentals

DevOps uses various programming languages for developing and automating software. To become a DevOps engineer, one should be aware of several programming languages in addition to specific DevOps tools. 

DevOps engineers don’t need to write source code but they will be integrating databases, debugging code from the development team, and automating processes. 

The three most common languages used with the DevOps tools are Python, Ruby and JavaScript. It’s recommended to have knowledge and understanding in at least one of these programming languages to work with the DevOps tools. 

It’s also essential for a DevOps Engineer to have knowledge of the fundamentals of the Linux Command Line Interface (CLI). The mandatory Linux skills that a DevOps engineer should know to include: 

• Linux shell – bash or ksh
• Linux commands – find, grep, awk, sed
• Networking commands – nslookup and netstat 

2. Study operating systems.

Knowledge of different Operating systems (OSs) is a crucial part of the technology stack that a DevOps team needs to function. OSs are not only used in local machines but OSs are used to run the servers that host the team’s deployed applications.

It’s advisable to learn the command line terminal so that it’s easy to configure the servers compared to the GUI interface. Command-line simplifies tasks that would require multiple clicks in a GUI interface, some commands are only executable through the terminal. Every OS is different in its operations, so learning more than one is advisable.

OSs to learn include:

• Linux (recommended)
• Unix
• Windows

3. Review networking security and protocols.

The web-based application requires protocols to transfer and receive information from the user. This means that it is also necessary to have knowledge about how protocols support different request types.

It’s important to understand the risk behind the transfer methods and secure them to prevent any external attacks from intercepting your data or infiltrating your application. Cybersecurity is an important skill to develop for the DevOps lifecycle.

Networking protocols to learn include HTTP, HTTPS,SSL and SSH.

4. Understand Infrastructure as Code.

For the application deployment Networks, servers, and other infrastructure are configured and managed using template files to create an environment with the application’s exact requirements. It is used to automate the fast deployment IaC strategies to learn include:

• Containers
• Configuration Management
• Container Orchestration
• Infrastructure Provisioning

5. Adopt Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment tools.

The principle behind DevOps is Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD). The CI/CD tools support multiple phases of the pipeline and automate processes and handoffs to free up team members.

CI/CD tools to learn include:

GitHub

• GitLab
• Bamboo
• Jenkins

6. Invest in application and infrastructure monitoring.

Monitoring is the way to detect the signs of trouble in your application and its underlying infrastructure so that your operations team can fix issues before they become outages. Naturally, this practice is divided into two parts: Application Monitoring and Infrastructure Monitoring.

Application monitoring tools to learn include:

• Prometheus (recommended)
• Nagios
• Datadog

Infrastructure monitoring tools to learn include:

• New Relic (recommended)
• Jaeger
• AppDynamics

7. Knowledge about different cloud providers

Modern applications are hosted in the cloud. Cloud vendors provide scalability.  You need to pay only when you need to host servers for your application. so it’s important to have knowledge of various cloud service providers and their unique costs and benefits, so you can select the best hosting for your applications according to the requirements.

Cloud providers to learn include:

• AWS (recommended)
• Azure
• Google Cloud

8. Learn about cloud design patterns.

Cloud design patterns are used to produce the scalability, reliability, and security of cloud applications. It is very important to understand these patterns.

The cloud best practices include maintaining high latency that can be applied to your applications hosted in the cloud before deployment, Keeping the backup of your source code in a cloud-enabled repository.

Cloud design patterns to learn include:

• Availability
• Data Management
• Design and Implementation

The above steps include an outline of all the core knowledge one should have to become a DevOps engineer. You can make your career growth in the DevOps role easy once you have this knowledge background to inform your understanding.

To end this discussion, let’s run through some key takeaways based on the different steps of the DevOps roadmap.

Career in DevOps: Key Points to remember 

1. Get technical experience

Gain enough technical experience in different programming languages and technologies. As a  DevOps engineer it is important to cover the full software development lifecycle, so technical experience in this field will enable us to better coordinate the different DevOps phases and collaborate with other team members. 

2.Prioritize concepts

Technical knowledge is important, but it’s very important to learn the reason behind a particular approach, and then it will be easy to convey to other team members. A DevOps engineer is responsible for the DevOps method on top of everything else within the team, so understanding the concepts behind the technology is an important key.

3. Have a general understanding of all concepts

As a DevOps engineer, you should have knowledge of the whole DevOps lifecycle, it’s better to have knowledge of all processes than be strong in only a few areas. As a DevOps you are responsible for moving the product between each contributor.

4. Passion for learning

Technology keeps on changing. Organizations will always look for advancement. As part of this, as a  DevOps engineer, you should always look for the next technical advancement on how to incorporate these into their process. You can built a very good career in DevOps field with right passion.