Learn more about DevOps engineers, their roles, and responsibilities
I have already discussed DevOps in my recent post, but this one would be different. So if you need a bit of understanding of what I'm about to tell here, check this post on IH about DevOps and DevOps engineers. So long story short, DevOps practice is impressive. And I think DevOps engineers need some proper attention.
The need for highly specialized result-oriented roles has increased in the last decade with the growing adoption of DevOps practices across organizations. It's not about skill-centric separate departments with a lack of sufficient communication. We talk about niche specialists responsible for tasks within dedicated cross-functional teams.
Did you know that DevOps has a lot of branches? Personally, when I first met such an engineer, I thought he was like a universal soldier, but they also specialize. If you are a DevOps yourself, write in the comments what your specialization is and why you choose it. Let's explore roles and responsibilities across DevOps engineering.
DevOps roles
The DevOps Evangelist is a leader or person responsible for ensuring that DevOps approaches are applied throughout the product development process while ensuring positive changes in the operational environment.
The Release Manager coordinates and manages the product from development to deployment and is in charge of releasing new software in shorter increments to reach end-users faster.
The DevOps Automation or Integration Engineer is responsible for analyzing opportunities for automation and their applicability, designing and implementing a continuous deployment strategy for high-availability requirements in production and test environments.
The IT Operations Engineer handles the deployment and management of applications and the infrastructure that hosts them and upholds the safety and internal regulations of the work environment to maintain the reliability of an entire infrastructure, equipment, and all system elements.
The DevOps QA Engineer is a part of the team in the Business Continuity, or Cybersecurity group that takes over comprehensive continuous testing and analysis aimed at finding opportunities to improve any of the functions to meet customer needs best.
The DevSecOps or Security Engineer monitors the health of the product, provides protection against external threats, and prevents the recurrence of any downtime or security risks.
The Configuration Management Engineer takes over the automation of mundane maintenance tasks to free up development time for actual programming and provides support for CI and deployment of several products across environments (data centers and public cloud).
The DevOps Business Analyst is upfront in designing requirements to coordinate product development according to customer needs and changing markets.
Such a niche fragmentation of responsibilities is inherent in huge projects mostly, where the presence of the entire spectrum of specialists involved in DevOps is necessary. On small projects, most often, the duties listed in all these roles are performed by one or several people.
DevOps responsibilities
Here is a short list of widely-accepted responsibilities of a DevOps team:
- CI/CD pipeline management and support
- Distributed planning, performance testing, and development
- Assistance with DevOps culture adoption
- Cloud deployment and management
- Automation implementation
- Understanding customer requirements and project KPIs
- Infrastructure management and maintenance
- Incident management and system monitoring
- Performance assessment and monitoring
- Vulnerability assessment and risk management
- Troubleshooting and fixing the code bugs
- Documenting the server-side features
A short but impressive list of responsibilities that provide businesses with their needs. By the way, here is a real-life example of DevOps working on a project. It's kinda interesting to read about the challenges and solutions they provided for them. So what do you think about DevOps now? It's a challenging job with a rapidly growing interest from other companies. More on DevOps can be found in the source. Do you need DevOps for your business? Comment below.
