What are the Career Opportunities in DevOps?

The combination of development and operations in IT gave rise to DevOps, which also involves quality assurance.

Due to increasing demand, professionals in this field are seeing more opportunities open for them. Hence, appropriately qualified professionals can comfortably find employment in multiple organizations, currently hiring and expect lucrative salaries as the field involves complex challenges requiring an extensive range of skills. In order to succeed, you need to go through intensive training like that of the DevOps Training which covers all modern requirements for aspirants.

Here’s an overview of the career opportunities you can expect.

Why is DevOps Gaining Popularity?

The increasing popularity of DevOps is mainly due to companies requiring the unique skills of such professionals, which can’t be found in other IT professionals.

Traditionally, IT organizations have operated with separate teams within the organization handling operations and development. This creates the challenge of communication and collaboration between the functions of the independent units.

As modern IT organizations face the need to deliver top-quality applications within limited time frames, against increasing competition, they require greater cohesion between separate teams. DevOps takes the central role of enhancing communication and collaboration within large companies, which effectively produces greater agility, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Through such enhanced operations, companies can even lower costs, which is vital in combating diminishing bottom lines. That, in turn, makes the companies more competitive and increases revenue.

Moreover, the aspect of user feedback has become incredibly vital in this era.

Organizations that don’t factor user feedback in their products and services can quickly lose customers and market share.

Having a dedicated DevOps professional is crucial in tying in all functions in the IT department. Instead of burdening the operations and development teams with more oversight roles, such teams can focus on doing what they do best under the supervision of such a professional.

IT firms require these professionals to execute several responsibilities crucial to the smooth running of the company. Such responsibilities include:

• Managing cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure…) operations: they deploy upgrades and fixes using computing skills.
• Ensuring stable software integrations: they apply user feedback in design, development, and implementation.
• Producing streamlined code development: they troubleshoot production issues while coordinating with development teams. They also implement automation frameworks and tools.
• Producing improvement in applications and on-time completion of projects: they analyze code and communicate detailed reviews to development teams.
• Improving engineering procedures, tools, systems, and data security: they achieve that by collaborating with team members.
• Optimizing organization computing architecture: they conduct system tests for security, performance, and availability. They also develop and maintain design and troubleshooting documentation.

Most importantly, the demand for DevOps is further enhanced by the benefits which companies derived from such professionals, such as:

• faster app releases
• higher-quality app releases
• rapid bug fixing
• shorter time between fixes
• no downtime

What is DevOps?

In simple terms, DevOps is all about collaboration between multiple IT teams like software developers, and system operators, to oversee code releases. It means professionals in this domain facilitate communication and cooperation between different IT teams, such as operations, software development, and testing.

DevOps professionals are useful in managing IT infrastructure that supports software code in hybrid, multi-tenant, or dedicated cloud environments. They provide required resources for software releases, determine the correct deployment models, test protocols that validate releases, as well as monitor performance. Much of the everyday tasks include testing data, analyzing results, communicating between IT teams, and troubleshooting problems.

Career Opportunities in DevOps

DevOps sits squarely within software developer occupations that are expected to increase by 24% between 2016 and 2026. That’s due to the increasing demand for such professionals, which is evident in the average salary of $92,339 offered to DevOps engineers.

Looking through multiple job boards, there’s an increasing occurrence of job vacancies in this area. As many companies are increasingly embracing collaboration and communication between their IT teams, they require experienced professionals to oversee such organizational shifts.

Some of the organizations currently hiring DevOps engineers include:

• Fusion IT, Inc.
• CONEX
• Continental Resources, Inc.
• NTT DATA, Inc.
• Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions
• Solidus Technical Solutions
• Louisiana Economic Development
• Capgemini Government Solutions
• Deloitte
• Nintendo of America Inc.

Due to the scarcity of qualified professionals in this domain, which becomes more evident in certain regions, you’re likely to get higher salaries in specific locations. For instance, DevOps engineers can get some of the highest salaries in the following areas:

• San Francisco, California – 34% above the average wage in the US.
• San Jose, California – 25% above the average salary in the US.
• Seattle, Washington – 17% above the average salary in the US.
• New York, New York – 15% above the average salary in the US.
• Austin, Texas – 1% above the average salary in the US.
• Boston, Massachusetts – 1% above the average salary in the US.

To succeed in this career, you certainly need a keen interest in technical infrastructure. Professionals in this field possess super technical abilities, interpersonal skills, and the capacity to perform under intense pressure.

Suggested Reading: Top 5 collaboration tools for DevOps teams

You must possess a range of in-depth skills, including:

• Experience in software engineering roles.
• Ability to use code deployment tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.
• Knowledge of Java web applications.
• Hands-on experience in monitoring servers, networks, and applications.
• Ability to deploy software-automation production systems like Selenium and Jenkins.
• In-depth knowledge of software development methodologies.
• Competency in Python or Ruby as well as tools such as GitHub and Git.
• Knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) and databases.

Most of all, you need a problem-solving attitude that keeps you pushing through challenges.

Conclusion

As you might be aware by now, DevOps provides great career opportunities. Today, most of the professionals in this field are either system admins or coders skilled as system administrators. To facilitate IT professionals planning to shift from traditional software development practices to this domain, there are various training and certifications available. These certifications aim to help IT professionals to learn the advanced concepts of this domain and prepare them for a successful career.