Beginners Steps to Land on a DevOps Engineer Profile

Considering the current IT market, the domain that looks like the best option for the IT folks’ career growth and salary is DevOps. DevOps is not a technology or a tool. Still, it is a culture, practice, or movement that emphasizes the communication and collaboration of both developers and operations teams while working on the automation of software infrastructure and delivery process. But the question that arises is what steps you must take to become a DevOps Engineer? Well, to answer it, the simple solution is DevOps Engineer Certification. But before that, let us dive into the process step-by-step and understand how you can practice DevOps effectively.

Organizations need people who are collaborative for adopting DevOps practices. They need people who are willing to change and are comfortable in adopting new technologies. Considering a tooling perspective, a good understanding of automation tools, systems, CI tools, networking, version control systems, and having experience in using various project management tools will help in paving the path for the adoption of DevOps.

The bitter fact is that you must understand that DevOps is not just for some systems or developers engineers. It is for anyone passionate about evolving technologies, practices, and willingness to work in a collaborative environment and work on automation to make everyone’s life better and easier. Here are a few steps that you can follow to land on a DevOps engineer profile:

Know the DevOps Culture

Before becoming a DevOps engineer, the first and foremost thing to do is understand the DevOps culture. DevOps is all about various teams working together to accomplish a common goal. We need DevOps to reduce the blame game in the company and establish a culture between different IT teams for better communication and hence better outcomes. Also, once you start practicing DevOps culture and understand it completely, you will realize that “Automation and CI/CD is DevOps” is a myth. With DevOps master certification, you can understand it better.

Learn the Unix System

We are living in an era where life without Linux or Unix systems is close to impossible. You should understand these systems better and know about various Linux distributions and their highly used workings (such as Ubuntu, RHEL, CoreOS, Centos, etc.). In the world of Unix, it’s all about terminal and less about GUI. So, start getting your hands dirty with the terminals of Unix systems.

Understand the Infrastructure and Working of Components

The primary building block of an organization is nothing but its infrastructure. It can either be on the on-premise data center or the cloud. Having an overview and understanding of the infrastructure components is a must for an individual aspiring to work in or practice in a DevOps environment. It will help gain a basic knowledge of networking, storage, single sign-on, load balancers, security, VPN, security, etc.

Get Cloud Certification

When it is about getting certification, don’t try to give the exam for the sake of a certificate, but do it only when you mean it. It will add significant value to your resume and will also help in boosting your knowledge. It won’t just be helpful for you but also for the organization to show that they have certified cloud engineers on board. You can pick one public cloud and gain knowledge of its core infrastructure services. To understand how it works in a better manner, do hands-on work on all the core services. You can get a DevOps Master certification, which can help you learn this better.

Learn Automating

These days no servers are created manually. It’s all about automation, and automation has become a crucial aspect of every company. These days right from application configuration, to provisioning servers, to deployment, everything must be automated, and hence you must spread your arms across various DevOps tools that meet your requirement. For example – Vagrant, Minikube, Docker Desktop, Minishift, CLIs, Terraform, Packer, Saltstack, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.

Distributed Systems, Containers, & Service Mesh

The adoption of containers is increasing as the days are passing by. It might be a case that the organization you are working in doesn’t work using containers now. But, it is always preferred to have hands-on knowledge of different container technology, for example, docker. It provides a competitive edge among others. On completing docker, you can also try orchestration tools and clustering like Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, etc. The platforms mentioned are best suited for architecture based on microservice.

Logging and Monitoring

The fundamental aspects of infrastructure are monitoring and logging. Almost all the apps deployed in the infrastructure produce metrics and logs. Depending on the design and architecture, records are stored in the logging infrastructure. All the companies will have a monitoring and logging infrastructure. The most widely used logging stacks are ELK and Splunk. There are also a few SaaS that provide the logging infrastructure, for example, Loggly.

DevSecOps

You must also understand the best security practices. DevSecOps is another domain that works on integrating security practices in every stage of the DevOps. Especially in a cloud environment, the most common attack is crypto mining. Usually, this happens in an organization when they don’t maintain the cloud access secrets properly. This helps the hackers to get access to it easily.

Learn Scripting and Coding

To collaborate better, you need to understand the Developers’ world better. And for doing so, you need to understand the development process of an organization. So, understanding APIs, programming, etc., will help you collaborate better and troubleshoot things.

Learn Git

Having version control for everything you do is essential. It won’t take much of your time to learn, and also, it is crucial to understand the git operations anyway. You can take up some time to learn the tutorials available online. And, of course, Git is always the best version control tool you can ask for.

Conclusion

DevOps is a promising career path with a flourishing future growth. DevOps Engineer Course can help an individual in making a great start to their journey in DevOps.