Target Audience
- Are you a developer looking to shift your career towards a more DevOps model?
- Are you a classically trained Ops person and you would like to get a feeling of what this whole DevOps thing is all about?
- Or are you neither, and having spent some time working with technology you are now simply looking for a career change and have no idea where to start?
- If so, read on, for we are going to see how to become a mid-level DevOps engineer in six months!
- Finally, if you have been doing this DevOps thing for years now, you might still find this useful as a validation of where we are and where this is going.
What’s This, Now?
First, what is DevOps?
You can google the definitions and wade through all that buzzword extravaganza but know that most are embarrassingly long word salads stuffed into giant run-on sentences. (See what I did there?)
So, I’ll save you the clicks and distill it down:
DevOps is a way to deliver software with shared pain and responsibility.
That’s it.
OK, but what does that mean?
It means that traditionally, the developers (people who create software) had incentives that were vastly different from operations (people who run the software.)
For example, as a developer, I want to create as many new features as fast as possible. After all, this is my job and that’s what customers demand!
However, if I’m an ops person, then I want as few new features as possible because every new feature is a change and change is risky.
As a result of this misalignment of incentives, DevOps was born.
DevOps attempts to fuse development and operations (DevOps, get it?) into one group. The idea is that one group will now share both the pain and the responsibility (and presumably, the rewards) of creating, deploying, and generating revenue from customer-facing software.
Now, purists will tell you to know that there is no such thing as a “DevOps Engineer”. “DevOps is a culture, not a role,” they will tell you.
Yeah, yeah. They are technically correct (the worst kind of correct!) but as it so often happens, the term has morphed beyond its original meaning.
Now, being a DevOps Engineer is something like “Systems Engineer 2.0.”
In other words, somebody who understands the Software Development Lifecycle and brings software engineering tools and processes to solve classic operations challenges.
DevOps ultimately means building digital pipelines that take code from a developer’s laptop all the way to revenue generating prod awesomeness!
that’s what it’s all about!
Also note that as a career choice, the whole DevOps space is highly compensated, with almost every company either “doing DevOps” or claiming to do so.
Regardless of where the companies are, the overall DevOps job opportunities are plentiful, offering fun, meaningful employment for years to come.
NOTE: Be wary of companies hiring for a “DevOps team” or a “DevOps department.” Strictly speaking, such things should not exist because ultimately, DevOps is all about the culture and a way of delivering software, not a new team or department to be staffed up.