The DevOps Engineer Job Explained: Why Is This Role so Important?

For companies looking to build modern, cloud-based products and services, onboarding specialized roles called DevOps engineers has become a critical-path function. Creating DevOps culture can be a significant change for organizations. The path forward is for C-suites to realize that DevOps is all about faster time to market and better products.
So what is a DevOps engineer, what do that do and why does it matter?

DevOps professionals come from all different types of IT backgrounds. While there isn’t one single path to becoming a DevOps engineer, the role has become an attractive challenge for many IT specialists with a passion for development and operations.

Călin is one of Pentalog’s autonomous DevOps engineers. His passion for IT led him to become a full-stack development expert. When Călin discovered that he could use these combined skills to help his team develop quicker and improved releases, he realized that he wanted to pursue a career as a DevOps engineer.

DevOps Engineer Responsibilities

The DevOps engineer role has evolved into one that fully embraces cloud infrastructure in dedicated, multi-tenant and hybrid environments. These specialists bridge the gap between two essential departments: software development teams and IT operations.

For IT specialists looking to have more visibility into a product’s deployment, a career as a DevOps engineer gives them this opportunity and provides them the chance to shine in a dynamic environment. DevOps professionals offer a wide range of soft and technical skills including exceptional communication abilities.

To gain a better grasp of the DevOps roles and responsibilities, let’s take a closer look at Călin’s job duties. Călin is part of a DevOps agility-driven team that works for a U.S.-based global entertainment company. Together with the client’s DevOps team, Călin and his teammates manage the company’s infrastructure on the cloud using AWS tools. Their mission is to enable rapid development and iteration of new features for an anime video streaming platform.

DevOps Engineer Job Specifications

Pursuing a career as a DevOps engineer, requires the ability to understand complex systems, innovate new ideas and projects to automate existing and legacy systems, deploy and resolve issues quickly, and support a service-oriented architecture.

Aspiring DevOps engineers must also have experience with several technologies, including:

• Linux/Unix systems
• AWS and other cloud-related IaaS
• Chef, Jenkins and other systems automation technologies
• Centralized logging stacks such as ELK
• Version control systems such as Git and writing version control system hooks
• Modern monitoring and graphing systems
• Current web and internet technologies such as Nginx, Redis, MariaDB, DNS and CDNs
• AWS CloudFormation and Terraform

Călin’s interests in deployment automation, network operations and system administration added another layer to his extensive experience around a variety of open source technologies. His deep understanding of automation tools, incremental code, testing and framework computerization propelled him into a position where he’s expected to move the business forward while growing the platform’s technology advantage.

DevOps Engineer Job Challenges

The main function of a DevOps engineer is to introduce continuous delivery and integration workflow, which requires understanding the previously mentioned tools as well as several programming languages. But, there are also several other responsibilities, which may include:

• Writing specifications and documentation for server-side features
• Managing continuous deployment and continuous integration (CI/CD)
• Writing CI/CD script
• Assessing and monitoring performance

During remote collaboration, it’s especially crucial the client trusts that tasks have been properly handled once you’ve wrapped up your part. DevOps engineers can also appreciate collaborating with well-trained specialists, talking about new approaches and learning more about the field.

DevOps Operations at Pentalog

Pentalog has a team of certified solution architects and engineers who are experts in cloud technologies (AWS, Azure, GCP) and DevOps practices.

“Before starting a project, we define long- and short-term goals, which are regularly tracked, refined and updated to ensure continuous improvement,” Călin said. “Agile and lean principles inspire our DevOps method, which continues throughout the entire product development lifecycle. Collaboration between business owners and development, operations and quality assurance teams build the foundation of DevOps. With this approach, software development and operation experts come together as a team to ensure that their goals are aligned and they work in sync to achieve them.”