Not a long time ago, such a job title as “DevOps engineer” didn't even exist. Yet, within the past few years, this profession has rapidly grown in popularity. According to LinkedIn, it was one of the most-recruited roles in 2018.
Today, despite the COVID pandemic and the resulting economic slowdown, HRs are looking to hire even more DevOps and engineers with cloud expertise. Technological organizations continue adding this role to their inventory in 2021. It makes DevOps engineering one of the highest-paying remote jobs on the market. This is an important statement for engineers interested in picking up new skills. They have the potential to become more attractive to HR managers and increase their earning prospects.
But what exactly is DevOps from a hiring perspective?
DevOps engineers are the bridge connecting software development, infrastructure, and deployment. But the definition of specialty itself may vary from client to client. Since this role is relatively new in the IT world, we have noticed that each company interprets it a bit differently. Some consider DevOps to be something like “old-fashioned” network administrators. Others consider they can manage deployment and orchestration systems, such as Jenkins, TeamCity, AWS pipelines, GitLab, etc. Most clients see DevOps primarily as cloud configuration engineers, embracing all the above as subsidiary responsibilities.
We always clarify with our clients the actual set of duties and responsibilities for a DevOps engineer to make sure we understand the client’s interpretation. We clear up the list of tasks, types of systems, and stacks that DevOps are expected to deal with. Full transparency in this matter attracts more candidates. They can see definite details written in a technical language they understand.
DevOps specialists integrate software development with the infrastructure. They create an automated workflow and maintain system stability, focusing on delivering quickly and with high quality. They should not be confused with Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). This type of specialists is primarily concerned with monitoring environments such as production and establishing metrics. They create telemetry and set up thresholds for alarms.
While maintaining responsibilities regarding coding, scripting, and automation, the main focus of DevOps is the process and support of the continuous motion of the development cycle. They work across departments and identify where the software automation and deployment are inefficient. DevOps engineers ensure these areas are configured properly to help software development teams proceed.
DevOps is now a corporate term and is here to stay. Their future career potential is bright and grows day by day. More and more companies, from startups to enterprises, use clouds such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. This technology has a direct impact on business metrics.
To sum up, DevOps is a practice that requires a cultural change in big, old enterprises. It necessitates new management principles as well as the use of technological tools. A DevOps engineer is in the center of the migration to the cloud and must have a broad set of skills to facilitate this change. DevOps becomes the standard in every organization. Over the last five years, tens of thousands of organizations have adopted DevOps in their teams' composition. Yet, the biggest enterprises will need to have teams of DevOps engineers. The DevOps department will manage and improve their infrastructure and maintain the software development lifecycle.