Top DevOps Skills in Demand Today
As automation becomes more and more prevalent throughout the computing industry, many companies are shifting from traditional system administration and operations to modern DevOps techniques. DevOps benefits companies by allowing them to automate more processes and increase agility.
As infrastructure-as-code and other DevOps technologies increase in popularity, software developers and system engineers without these skills risk being left behind. In this article, we’ll explore increasingly popular DevOps technologies and the skills required to take advantage of them.
Serverless Architecture
One of the most significant trends in DevOps is the move to different types of serverless architectures. From infrastructure as a service to cloud functions (like AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions), serverless means that more infrastructure is represented with high-level abstractions. In general, with serverless architectures, businesses spend more time developing applications and less time building infrastructure to support them.
Kubernetes and the Continued Rise of Containers
Although Linux container technology has been on an upward trend for many years, container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes are just now being accepted by large enterprises. The power of container orchestration allows for better fault tolerance, easier upgrades, multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption, and other useful techniques.
Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration is a huge advantage for a candidate. These skills are oftentimes difficult to acquire but extremely useful with the rise of containers and Kubernetes in many organizations and work environments.
Become a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)!Security First
Throughout the history of computers, security has frequently been second to performance. In the case of business applications, it’s oftentimes more important to get the application done than for it to be secure. However, with the rise of security breaches and the greater effects of security errors on companies’ bottom lines, putting security first is becoming increasingly popular.
Automated fuzz testing, fault injection, and other techniques are being used at the beginning of product life cycles to fundamentally improve security. DevSecOps is a relatively new term used to describe this fundamental integration of security practices into early application development. Familiarity with these tools and security best practices is crucial in today’s environment.
Greater Use of Continuous Delivery
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) were some of the first major DevOps technologies to be adopted by a large variety of companies. However, CI primarily deals with code. DevOps assembly lines are a more all-encompassing technology that also automates and tests infrastructure and configuration management for operations. Security patching, test automation, deployments, and other functionality is integrated using DevOps assembly lines, making the deployment process faster and increasing agility.
In general, modern continuous delivery and DevOps assembly lines are a continuation of the already growing trend of continuous integration. These technologies make automation easier and generally increase the efficiency of the entire software development life cycle. Knowing how to use these technologies can make a candidate stronger in a modern corporate environment.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
With the increase in artificial intelligence-powered applications, these technologies have a greater presence in the DevOps pipeline. Although data science and machine learning are different in many ways from traditional application development, they can benefit from DevOps technologies in much the same way. Automated AI model deployment, testing, and maintenance can make a big difference to the productivity of teams using AI, ML, and data science.
Breaking Down Silos
The overarching idea of DevOps is to remove the “wall” between software development and operations. Instead of releasing a software version and “throwing it over the wall” to the operations staff, organizations using DevOps integrate these two sides to increase efficiency and agility and decrease risk. These technologies are a great way to integrate every team at an organization, so knowing how to use them is a major advantage for a software engineer.