What will you get if you hire a DevOps Engineer?

Of course, you have heard of DevOps. Today it is in a huge demand as modern technology requires new approaches, more powerful and productive than before. If your business is aimed at the further development, enlargement, and enhancement, you would likely need the help of DevOps engineer. 

The development of a web or mobile application is a complex project that includes not only the work of developers, but also the commitment of designers, support, and many others. However, DevOps encompasses all those aspects of the application lifecycle and allows pushing the development to its limits. 

DevOps ensures better communication between development and operations promoting collaboration within team and implementation of best practices during the creation of the project. Since this new philosophy improves the project on a higher level DevOps engineers are considered must-have team members. 

DevOps engineers evolve either from sysadmins or developers. It is usually a person who has rich experience with software projects and knows how to manage the project from the designing stage to deployment, have at least basic knowledge of programming languages, and can ensure efficient support and monitoring. They rarely create projects from scratch and are more in charge of improving the IT-infrastructure. 

The main responsibilities of a DevOps engineer usually include:

Automation is considered one of the major benefits of DevOps. Since engineers try to make the project’s tweaks and upgrades fast, automation becomes an essential part of software operations. To be brief, DevOps engineers achieve more frequent changes, faster deployment, better code quality, improved regression tests, unit tests, CI/CD, transparent monitoring, etc.

Once you hire DevOps engineer on your project, you ensure teams collaboration (even if before they did not seem to have to work a lot together), automated workflows (a lot of microservices and tools are used in work for cloud management, containerization, monitoring, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, etc), faster troubleshooting, decreased risks, and an effective business model on the whole. 

What makes DevOps engineers true saviors of IT projects brings challenges at the same time. No surprise that even the most progressive aspect of modern IT sphere has its drawbacks. However, just have a look at them and you’ll figure out that they can be easily overcome.

Sure thing, DevOps was invented to overcome the barrier between these two departments, although their relationships still remain a problem sometimes. The thing is that their mentality and toolset differ and achieving a consent may be a hard work. Development is trying to be creative and innovative, implement changes quickly while operations are working on maintenance of 100% service levels. Because of that, project management becomes outdated when cross-functional teams begin to bloom. They count each and every detail of the product (architecture, design, development, support, etc) that unite all the specialists involved in the project. In its turn, DevOps engineers can establish better communication with anyone.

As we discussed, DevOps is all about automation involving microservices and tools. DevOps engineers are really chasing various innovation. Infrastructure as code, containerization, continuous testing and continuous deployment make the product up-to-date and allows using all the possibilities offered by technology.

Involving more and more tools and focusing only on working them might make you forget about your staff. Human resources are usually what makes tools work, so they should not be neglected. It is necessary to invest time and energy into training your employees, during which they will focus on technology and learn about continuous development, testing, integration, deployment, and operations. The balance within your teams will bring you balance in working with new technology tools.

DevOps specialists work along with many other software professionals and there is no united group of people which could be accurately called a DevOps team. Sometimes there may be misunderstanding of the workflow and activities one or another member of the project does because all of the members have different vision based on their profession. 

A standardized process is the thing DevOps needs. Defining tasks of everyone and stating a common goal will ensure a smooth work. Communication remains the most important soft skill for implementing DevOps best practices.

DevOps is definitely mainstream nowadays, and demand for it is very well-grounded. A DevOps engineer combines a very large set of skills and experience, while still continues chasing innovations and is ready to provide everything for your project. Once you hire such a specialist you can be sure that your product follows all the modern tendencies and has up-to date functionalities, that it works at its best.

At YourServerAdmin we have a team of seasoned DevOps engineers and offering qualified assistance for nearly 10 years. Here in details what we can help you with.