Skills required to survive a devops role

in #linux6 years ago

Skills required to survive a devops role:

What does Devops mean? Devops is a buzzword that came from the term “devops” which is meant to be a way of operating a team, where the sysadmin has a good knowledge of coding and usually sits between a bunch of backend people. Devops should all be about helping people do their jobs faster and better.

The end result of devops should be:

  • More automation in projects and much more documentation. If the sysadmin/“devops person” is dead or on leave then everyone should be able to do what they are supposed to. Spinning up a dev server or container of some sort should only be a script and a wiki page or README.md away. Ideally you should automate yourself out of your job(don’t worry your skills will always be in high demand).

What kind of background should you have?
Any kind of system administration and developer background will be good to have, although if you have both you are probably better off. Remember that you will be working with developers and sometimes senior developers and they will expect you to know more about “devops” related things than you. So use this peer pressure to skill up! There is no “ideal background” for a “devops” type of role. In an ideal world though you would have the following experience:

  • Big data experience: Hopefully your career has kept you far away from Hadoop and you've only touched NoSQL,Elasticsearch,Kafka etc. If you've touched Hadoop then I feel sorry for you.
  • Linux,BSD and Windows sysadmin experience. If you don't have BSD or Windows experience it is not the end of the world.
  • Docker experience. Kubernetes and the like can be picked up later on.
  • Bash scripting experience. If you write dockerfiles or work with some CI system like travic-ci then you will see why bash scripting is required.
  • Web application development experience including experience with fixing migrations.
  • Penetration testing experience. Bug bounty,CTF or red team experience is even better.

What are some skills that you will need to be able to fill a devops role? Right now the world of “devops” is becoming more and more popular and the demand for “devops” engineers is growing, so what can you do in order to land a role like this?

I could write a whole book about the technical skills that would help in this type of role and I’ll to a quick review of the technical skills that you need. Before I do that let’s have a look at the essential non-technical skills that you will need to be able to survive a “devops role”.

Skills required:

  • Ability to cope with huge amounts of stress and large amounts of work that nobody else on your team has the time nor the skills to perform.
  • Good social skills and the ability to gather intelligence in terms of what is going on in the organisation and which projects need some “love” from a infrastructural point of view.
  • Ability to express yourself in writing. This will help you when it comes to writing emails, talking to people on slack, writing documentation etc. There is this huge emphasis on learning to do public speaking at high school and college level, but in my opinion your ability to articulate yourself in writing is worth far more than the ability to be a good orator.
  • If you’ve ever sold anything in your life or if you ever worked as a business analyst then you will know that it is really hard to get people to tell you exactly what it is that they want and to deliver on that. People in general aren’t very good at giving instructions. You will work with a whole bunch of developers and some of them will ask you to help them with something, but it is up to you to ask the right questions and find out exactly what it is that you need to get done for them. Also you should see yourself as somebody that offers solutions instead of somebody who does things to keep the developers happy. Sometimes you will have to figure out if what the are asking is actually a good idea and worth doing.
  • You need to be very good at managing your time if you are in a devops role. Time is not something that you will have much of so you have to be very frugal with your time.
  • I just mentioned being “frugal”, in a devops type of role you will have think of clever ways to save your company and clients money as cloud providers tend to be very expensive. There are many ways that you can approach this, but always remember that when cutting costs not to cut corners. If being frugal with your spending means wasting time then you aren’t actually being frugal, since time is money. (Especially if you are billing clients by the hour for the work you are doing.)
  • A good knowledge of security and some experience can be very good for a devops role. You are the person that an adversary will want to attack. If you have access to multiple cloud accounts for e.g Azure,AWS and Cloud, then remember people will go a long way to compromise those accounts. People will even go as far as to put a gun to your head to get those account details from you. If you don’t believe me on this one then I can post some articles to back it up. This is one of the reasons I got out of infosec, I always scared of being kidnapped for my “skillset”.
  • I probably mentioned this already, but the ability to do technical writing is incredibly important. I got experience with writing reports from doing penetration testing
    and I get even more experience with writing, by writing articles on steemit. So keep writing, even if you never make money out of steemit I can promise you that technical
    writing is an incredibly good skill to have. If you look at some of the highest earning people working in corporate settings, they will usually have to write tons of reports
    , promo docs (sometimes even for your own promotion, not just for promoting your ideas) so hop on it and get writing.

One more Meme:

You are probably thinking by now, he can't fit another damn meme in here. Well:


One more thing before I finish off, an important part of your job is actually to say no to people, or to
listen to people and explain to them that they need something else than what they think they need. This can be hard. You will get better
at this over time. But don't be a "blocking sysadmin" , those guys who should be kept in the basement and want to stop everyone from doing anything.

Thanks for reading.

Also thanks to @freezepeach and @bycoleman and many more. Helping me to survive the bern.
Please support @transparencybot and @freezepeach:

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@freezepeach/freezepeach-the-flag-abuse-neutralizer

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