Who is a DevOps engineer?

A DevOps engineer introduces processes, tools, and methodologies to balance needs throughout the software development life cycle, from coding and deployment, to maintenance and updates.

Maybe you want to shift your career to DevOps, or train yourself to drive adoption within your company. But how do you become a DevOps engineer?

DevOps engineers reduce that complexity, closing the gap between actions needed to quickly change an application, and the tasks that maintain its reliability.

Development teams and IT operations teams can have different skills and different goals. Developers want to introduce new features to an application, while operations teams want to preserve the stability of an application once it is released. 

DevOps is all about the unification and automation of processes, and DevOps engineers are instrumental in combining code, application maintenance, and application management. All of these tasks rely on understanding not only development life cycles, but DevOps culture, and its philosophy, practices, and tools. 

Within an agile environment, developers, system administrators, and programmers can be siloed, working on the same product but not sharing information necessary to ensure value to the user. 

Some organizations may hire professionals to "perform DevOps" within their workflows, but because successful DevOps adoption depends on changes to culture and process, this may just deepen the disconnect between developers and operational teams.

DevOps engineers build new skills on top of their current experience. Tasks like data management and library updates for new product releases combine with needs for leadership and collaboration across teams. It is important for DevOps engineers to understand the fundamentals of application development and delivery.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

You and your teams can build and test changes, add to repositories, and deploy updates quickly and efficiently.

Security

DevOps processes such as CI/CD security can be used to safeguard code pipelines with automated checks and testing to prevent vulnerabilities in software delivery. 

Most professionals embracing DevOps culture combine tools and practices with years of enterprise IT experience. Think about acquiring knowledge outside of your skill set—and maybe outside of your team— in order to gain the holistic view needed to become a DevOps engineer. 

At Red Hat, we have resources to help you and your organization on your way to DevOps.