Seven points to consider when cherry picking your next DevOps rock star

The term DevOps could have a different meaning for different companies and managers. That said, the definition of perfect skill-set is totally based on the company’s needs and therefore, it is sometimes challenging to define the role of a DevOps engineer accurately.

Clearly, DevOps and Software developers are different roles as well as for Operations and QA. In fact, DevOps is actually a blend of all three abovementioned skills, and a DevOps engineer is a professional capable of solving efficiency and operational challenges at the highest levels.

For the past two or three years, the trend of hiring DevOps engineers is on the rise. The reports suggested that 2/3 of firms who hired DevOps specialists have benefited of increased productivity, innovation, quality, and market growth.

As more and more firms have shown keen interest in hiring DevOps specialists, the recruiting process has become more challenging. Although it is a difficult procedure, it is not impossible. Recruitment posts related to DevOps always have few requirements in common, such as:

• Cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, and others)

• Release management tools such as Git, Jenkins

• Programming languages such as Python and Go.

This list, or these types of lists, creates ambiguity in terms of what hiring managers are actually looking for.

The below seven points are for the hiring managers to consider when cherry picking their DevOps rock stars

CI/CD

Continuous deployment and integration are the two essentials for keeping the mainline updated in a DevOps’s project. It means a version control system such as Git is used to track the base branch of a project’s code. A DevOps specialist does it by merging the mainline and all working copies once or a few times in every release.

Mind the Automation Experience

Automation is one major skill for DevOps engineers. Therefore, as an employer, you must ensure that the candidate you are looking for is capable of solving business or technical issues by staff automation.

Automating maximum things at every level of the project is one core responsibility of a DevOps engineer. It is very tiring and time-consuming to debug every single code. Therefore, automation is a mandatory skill for DevOps engineers as a problem-solving technique at the micro-level.

Monitoring

A DevOps engineer needs to keep monitoring the project’s progress at every single level of the development. For instance, server microservices, databases, services, etc., are just like an application's building blocks. Therefore, continuously monitoring the availability and operability of these factors is crucial.

You need a Problem Solver

Facing blackouts and emergencies is a part of a DevOps engineer’s curriculum. DevOps engineers are just like firefighters. They must have the strong technical knowledge, proven expertise, and a proper understanding of IT processes. Moreover, they must be sufficiently familiar with postmortems and incident management. They must have good problem solving and decision-making skills as well as experience in virtualization.

Experienced in Scripting

For any DevOps engineer, top quality scripting skills are included in the basics. A valuable DevOps engineer must be well versed in writing codes on platforms like Ruby, Perl, Python, JavaScript, etc. A DevOps engineer must know that language solely depends on a project’s context and the DevOps tools needed.

The simpler the language script, the better it will be. Most of the DevOps engineers will have worked in a few languages and may have strong in-depth knowledge in one of two of them. A DevOps engineer’s ability to effectively read the design patterns is more important than the language itself.

Cloud Technologies and Hardware

Businesses had their own hardware for running IT business or IT related transactions in the past. But, the time has changed a lot, and some giant companies such as Google and Amazon rent out their hardware on a monthly basis. The cost of rent is almost negligible as compared to the cost of the hardware.

This trend of renting hardware rather than purchasing is becoming a common practice nowadays. This helps businesses to reduce the overall costs significantly as they get assistance from purely dedicated teams. It also helps to boost up the launching process in businesses, products, or offering the clients dedicated trial setups. Most importantly, it allows business owners to focus on their core objectives rather than worrying about hardware issues.

Of course… Soft skills!

Soft skills, for a DevOps engineer, are equally important as primary skills. A DevOps engineer must have effective communication skills, should be service-oriented, and place the project's success above other things. A proactive engineer is always the preferred choice of employers.

Moreover, strong interpersonal communication skills are vital for a DevOps engineer as it is necessary to communicate with teammates effectively. Generally, DevOps teams create communication strategies to regulate the flow of communication in the team.