DevOps Engineer Roles and Responsibilities

Let's learn about the philosophy and skills a DevOps Engineer should have

Reference: [Inflearn] DevOps: Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and AWS Course by Song Juyoung

What is a DevOps Engineer?

• For a proper DevOps culture,

  • A person who automates repetitive tasks in the service or S/W lifecycle,

  • And is responsible for technically preventing and resolving technical problems or differences between teams

• A person who applies common DevOps Engineering-related technologies to various places

Required Skills for a DevOps Engineer

Soft Skills

• Problem Identification

  • Must identify what problems exist

  • Must identify the exact root cause

• Prioritization and Focus

  • Solve problems through appropriate methods

  • Correctly set the priority of solutions

• Decision Making

  • Must make quick decisions with conviction, not guesswork, among numerous options

    • Decisions must be backed by supporting data

• Nature of the Business

  • Must understand the essence and value of the service being provided

• Users

  • Understand users

  • Must provide fast feedback to requirements

    • Fast feedback and application are needed

Technical Skills

• Programming

  • Being proficient in languages like Go, Python is a great strength

    • ex) Go, Python, Node.js, etc.

      • Yay, Python!

• Operating Systems

  • Must be proficient with operating systems like Linux and must know the concepts

    • ex) Shell, OS metrics, File system, 7 layers, etc.

• Server Management

  • Must build reliable services through server management skills and operational knowledge

    • ex) IaC, CI/CD, API, availability, performance, etc.

• Open Source

  • Must understand the S/W that makes up the infrastructure and be able to use automation tools

    • ex) nginx, Tomcat, MySQL, Redis, Ansible, Terraform, etc.

• Cloud

  • Must be proficient in Public Cloud and be able to build and design directly

    • ex) AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba, etc.

Infrastructure as Code

• Building infrastructure components such as servers, middleware, services through code

  • IaC has the advantages of code:

    • Ease of writing

    • Reusability

    • Maintainability

    • Documentation, etc.

IaC Tool: Terraform

• Terraform is a tool made for IaC to create, change, and record infrastructure,

  • With easy syntax making it relatively easy to use

  • And with a very large user base providing many examples for reference

• Supports not only Public Clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP but also various other services

Virtues of a DevOps Engineer

• Must think of as many possible scenarios as possible

  • After that, reflect in code and during execution, leave logs and do monitoring steadily for a long time

• It is also important to write code so that it is checked multiple times during execution and actually runs only when all conditions match

• Must properly build test environments

• To become a DevOps engineer, knowing specific products or technologies is not enough

  • Products and technologies always change with the advancement of the industry

• Understanding of the DevOps philosophy and the underlying lifecycle is also important

  • Therefore, one must understand the core of DevOps: Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration processes (CI/CD), and the software testing that accompanies them!

DevOps Engineer Skills

• Basics: Linux administration, Python, AWS or other cloud platforms

• Configuration: Terraform or Ansible

• Version Control: Git and GitHub

• Packaging: Docker

• Deployment: Jenkins

• Execution: Amazon ECS and Kubernetes

• Monitoring: ELK Stack

DevOps Developer Roadmap - 2020

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