What tools do you need to master to become a DevOps engineer

Aсель Madiyarbekova, city — San Francisco, DevOps Engineer, @aselincali  

DevOps as a profession emerged relatively recently as a response to the problems that existed between developers and system administrators. In the past, development teams created code, while system administrators were responsible for running it on servers. Conflicts often arose between them: developers aimed to release new features faster, while system administrators wanted stability and minimized failures.

The DevOps profession emerged from the combination of two approaches: Agile development, which focuses on rapid software creation with regular updates, and ITIL with Lean, which are oriented toward optimizing processes to increase efficiency. The idea is to bring developers and operations teams together for closer collaboration. Instead of working separately, teams jointly work on automating processes, testing, deploying, and monitoring applications. Thanks to automation and close collaboration, new updates are released more frequently and with fewer issues.

As demand for professionals grows, so does salary, because there are far fewer experts in this field compared to developers. So if you want to change careers and don't know which tech direction to choose, maybe DevOps is what you need.

What you need to learn to become a DevOps Engineer

Cloud platforms such as AWS, Amazon Web Services, Azure, and GCP, Google Cloud Platform are the largest cloud platforms. You need to know how to manage servers, databases, networks, and other resources in the cloud. But don't try to learn all three; knowing all three is good, but most companies use only one of the platforms. Choose a platform depending on the company you want to work for and the technology it uses.

In the DevOps field, coding is not considered the most important factor. A very small part of professionals know Java, but you should pay attention to Python and Bash, which are needed for writing automation scripts. Also, for automation, you need knowledge of Terraform — infrastructure as code, as well as managing servers and networks through software code. Terraform's popularity is growing rapidly; if you have strong skills in this tool, you are already halfway there.

Many DevOps tools run on Linux; knowledge of this system is critical, and it's important to learn how to manage servers on this OS. A significant part of a DevOps engineer's job involves troubleshooting, and one of the most important tools is Linux. It will definitely be asked about during interviews.

Tools for process automation, CI/CD — such as GitHub Actions, for testing and deploying applications on GitHub. These tools will help automate and manage infrastructure, speeding up development and improving application stability.

It is also important to study Docker — a tool for containerization. It allows you to "package" applications into containers, which simplifies their deployment and portability. Together with it, an excellent combo would be Kubernetes — a system for managing containers, especially Docker. It helps scale and automate container operations.

I hope the tools described above have lifted the veil on the world of DevOps and will help you achieve your goals.