Career in DevOps
Want to start a career in DevOps?
Before reading this article any further, you want to be sure that you have read my article on What DevOps is. DevOps adopts the practice of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, CI/CD, to enable rapid software changes while maintaining system stability and security. In many organizations adopting DevOps, there is usually an individual or a team that is accountable for the tools used to automate software delivery. This individual or team builds and manages the CI/CD pipeline. They are responsible for the infrastructure and tools that make up the pipeline. Some organizations call this a DevOps team or a DevOps Engineer, others call it Tools team or Deployment team.
4 Career Stages in DevOps
stage 1 — Gathering the prerequisite knowledge
stage 2 — DevOps All-round knowledge
stage 3 — DevOps on Cloud Platform
stage 4 — Culture, Philosophy, and Mindset
Stage 1 — Prerequisite
Linux Operating system course. You should be comfortable working at the Linux command line and with a Linux text editor. You should be familiar with IT topics such as IP addresses, virtual machines, and web servers.
- How to configure a server
- How to configure server networks
- Understanding file systems
- How to deploy software packages
Stage 2 — DevOps All-round knowledge
- Version Control with Git — Entry Level
- Selenium
- Docker Containers
- Kubernetes
- Grafana
- Ansible/Puppet/Chef
- Terraform
- Jenkins/CircleCI
Stage 3 — DevOps on Cloud Platform
Decide whether you want to use AWS/GCP/Azure. This is where you’d have a taste of the real-world DevOps challenges. Don’t be discouraged, it may take you up to 3 months to cover depending on the number of hours you can dedicate towards learning.
After completing this stage, you have earned yourself the right to be called DevOps Engineer.
Programming to Learn for DevOps
- Python Programming Language
- Bash
- Powershell (Depends if you will be operating Microsoft workloads)
I would personally recommend learning Bash scripting and Python occasionally as you continue in your DevOps learning path.
Stage 4 — Culture, Philosophy, and Mindset
This stage requires that you focus more than just tooling. You began to affect the way your organization adopts the DevOps principle. You ultimately become a mentor.
Learning Schedule
To get started on your DevOps career path, you can use the schedule below to equip yourself for the all-round DevOps knowledge.
AWS Training
Recommended free training on AWS
Final advice, do find yourself a mentor. There is a popular opinion in tech communities that there is nothing like a Junior DevOps Engineer or DevOps practitioner due to the number of years of experience required for this role so you would want to reduce banging your head on the wall by having a mentor showing you the ropes.
Thanks!
