Key 8 DevOps Engineer Skills for a Successful Career

DevOps is more than just another technological trend — it is a vital set of processes for optimizing operations to speed up development. Here, we discuss the essential skills to make it in the job market as a DevOps engineer and speak with EPAM Cloud Engineering Manager Santiago Castellanos about developing in DevOps at EPAM. 

Knowledge of DevOps tools and technologies

A DevOps engineer should know how to use a long chain of complex tools—including version control, continuous integration servers, configuration management, automation processes, database administration, monitoring and analytics, testing and cloud technologies, Infrastructure as Code tools and so on.

It’s important to understand the roles of each tool in the chain, consider all dependencies and ensure that all solutions are fully combined at different stages of development and operations. This approach leads to the successful implementation of this methodology.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are the core of the DevOps approach. This means seamless code integration from different developers, continuous testing and deployment of bug-free code to production. Continuous integration (CI) automates code integration into a single piece of software, allowing data to be combined efficiently. On the other hand, Continuous Delivery allows different tools and systems to be combined to create fully functional and consistent delivery pipelines.

CI/CD are among the key technical DevOps skills. Engineers must be aware of tools such as VSTS, Bamboo, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, GitLab CI, Spinnaker, Travis, AWS (CodeBuild and CodePipeline) and others.

Automation

Work facilitation and process automation are key tasks of DevOps. A high-quality, skilled engineer should be able to automate the entire pipeline, from CI/CD to configurations and beyond. Automation skills are closely related to the knowledge of the necessary toolset, coding and scripting languages. Automation tools facilitate all manual tasks and workflows, resulting in faster software development and deployment.

To offer high-quality automation, an engineer will need the knowledge and skills of Bash, Python, JavaScript, AWS Lambda, CloudWatch Events, SNS and others.

Coding and scripting

While programming skills are required for all development approaches, DevOps engineers play an essential role in writing code. The key tasks here are the organization of a stable, efficient and maximally automated pipeline or the creation of new solutions that can automate the pipeline stages to optimize the team's work.

A skilled engineer, particularly in DevOps, should focus on understanding the logic and principles behind various programming languages like Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Bash, Shell, Node.js and more, rather than mastering each one in depth. This foundational understanding allows them to pivot and adapt between languages effectively.

Cloud

DevOps and the cloud are not just closely related; the performance of one directly depends on the other. If DevOps solutions develop the process, then the cloud implements this process, giving it the right environment for testing, deploying and releasing code. Cloud computing skills and experience enable you to design and create your own cloud systems, simplify complex cloud systems and enforce best practices across a wide range of cloud service offerings.

Today's main cloud services are Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM.

Testing

The success of DevOps depends on quality and proper testing. Automated tests should run permanently and without failures. Continuous testing can significantly reduce the time to receive feedback after code testing. DevOps specialists' main task is to speed up the delivery of the end product to customers as much as possible. The quality of the software or application plays a key role in this.

Engineers should constantly test their work and be familiar with automated continuous testing tools such as Selenium, TestComplete and TestingWhiz as well as continuous monitoring tools like Nagios, Zabbix, Splunk and so on.

Technical support and maintenance

The scope of DevOps professionals is not limited to the development environment. Good engineers support the entire process, fix issues when they occur and keep production systems up and running using customer-centric capabilities. This means that engineers must monitor products in real-time, receive instant alerts in case of failures and errors in operation and solve problems through online support or technical troubleshooting.

DevOps management is impossible without continuous technical support and maintenance, making it one of the most important skills for DevOps engineers.

Security

Security and protection are vital criteria when developing and deploying code. This means engineers must have the security knowledge and skills to write highly secure code. This minimizes risk, protects software or apps from possible hacks and attacks, ensures a lower failure rate and reduces defects throughout the end product's life cycle. This DevSecOps skill set is a powerful competitive advantage of DevOps in the professional market.

Developing in the DevOps role at EPAM

Santiago Castellanos joined EPAM in 2021 and has grown from a Lead Systems Engineer to a Cloud Engineering Manager in recognition of his technical, leadership and people development skills.

This is what he shared about developing in the DevOps career track at EPAM:

“Unlike other employers, EPAM's perspective of my role is much broader, much more structured and has all the tools for in-depth development. There are also specialties within each role, which motivates me to go deeper into specific knowledge.

EPAM has fully met my expectations in every way. I have a very well-structured career plan and get a lot of help from the teams responsible for our professional and personal growth.

I have had the opportunity to grow in every sense of the word. I have the autonomy to propose and execute any type of task in my project. I was also promoted in my role and received all the tools to achieve the goals I’ve set for myself.

At EPAM I really feel heard, not only because someone sits down to listen to me, but they really show interest in your situation and what they can do to improve how you feel working for the company. This is something unique that I value very much.”

Are you ready to grow as a DevOps engineer at EPAM? Explore our open DevOps jobs and apply.