I often hear the same question, what are mandatory skills needed becoming a DevOps engineer or developing and operating specialists, especially for those who coming from strictly programming area. Where to begin for fresher or what is the best start point for someone how is a newbie in IT on his own?
I can say for sure, there is no a secret ingredient or mystery combination of talents. All you need is firmly decide for yourself and to be consistent on the way to goal. Right, it sounds pretty common but that is an absolute truth.
Despite of this, I would highlight a 10 key skills, from my experience, which help to become a good developer and operational specialist.
1. Ability to change mindset. The most important thing you have to take into consideration is start thinking out of the developer box. DevOps is not a just a mix of everything about application development from one side and administration from another. This is a new mindset which is in many based on agile practice. DevOps methodology tightly relates to operation and security best practice, tools and methods. To become a good specialist you should not know everything. No one knows everything. But you have to understand basics of the next integral components of IT.
2. Operation system (OS) basics knowledge. OS is a core of any computing system. 90% of all cloud environments and even IoT devices are based on one of the Linux distribution. Moving around infrastructure it is vital to know how active directory or ldap protocol works. System administration and configuration are major of daily basis responsibilities of DevOps specialist.
3. Start digging into networking. Networking is another very important skill to become not only a good operational and also security specialist as well. How does TCP work, what is DNS and ARP protocols. How does secure communication work, what is TLS or Kerberos. What is 3-way handshake and so on. All of these very basics you have to know doing daily work.
4. Learn security basics. Fundamental security knowledge, especially confirmed by a certification like CompTIA Security+ makes you one of the most wanted and desired candidate for a company hiring a operation professional. Why? Highly recommended check my previous review of most important threats in 2023. The data is a greatest asset of any organization. Data loss or breach may costs a company millions and reputation. Moving to a cloud it become more and more important to keep data safe outside of on premise perimeter. Encryption, cryptography, secret management, secure cloud storage configuration are the most important elements which any security professional have pay significant attention on.
5. Scripting and automation: Python, PowerShell or whatever you like. Automation is core of DevOps methodology. Doing the same operation in reproducible way, automation of data retrieval, processing and ingestion, controlling configuration drift, all of these are strongly important to manage a complex hybrid infrastructure. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and desired state configuration (DSC) are two whales on which reliable infrastructure management built.
6. Containerization. Microservice infrastructure became a industry standard. DevOps engineer should be able to easy manage both containers and convenient applications. Docker, Kubernetes, Fargate, these are the most common enterprise hosting platforms nowadays. And of course, security aspects. Containerization provides high level of abstraction and isolation between application components.
7. Virtualization. No organization which is never use a virtual machine (VM) as part of infrastructure. Infrastructure-as-a-service is still the most popular solution on premise and core of cloud. Managing EC2, Azure stack and hyperconverged infrastructure is a great asset for any operational specialist in 2023.
8. Learn CI/CD. Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) is integral part of DevOps process. Secure and reproducible release management flow to be a recipe for success of software development life cycle (SDLC). One of the most important trends now is a shifting security left. We should care about tests at the earliest stage of SDLC as it possible. Better keep security requirements current with SecSDLC. And CI/CD is the best place to implement it.
9. Be familiar with a cloud technologies and providers: AWS, Azure or GCP. Almost all organizations leverage cloud to achieve necessary computing power and reduce a costs. Pay-as-you-go model is ideal for small startups. Almost infinite data storage, high scalable, high available and resilient infrastructure all of these might be easy realized with cloud. But moving outside of own data center may become a long journey without good DevOps team and enhanced cloud knowledge.
10. Monitoring and logging tools. Last but not least. Appropriate logging and monitoring allows to find a problem and prevent a failure even before it happens. Application Insights, CloudWatch, Prometheus are the most known platforms for audit and monitor infrastructure, alerts in case if spike detected.
It was a very brief review, just my point based on personal experience. I really hope that the post will help you to find own way to ace. Of course, there is no an universal path to become a DevOps engineer. Each of you should choose your own way which the best matches your individuality.
Be an ethical, save your privacy!