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  • Gartner predicts that DevOps will become mainstream in 2016, to be implemented by more than 25% of Global 2000 firms.


So what is a DevOps engineer?  What do they actually do?


DevOps engineers tend to have been sysadmins who had a passion for scripting, development, and doing things the right way, or developers who became interested in deployment automation.


While there is no agreed upon set of skills that a DevOps engineer must possess, some skills in coding in languages like Ruby and Python, familiarity with CI/CD systems like Jenkins, Bamboo or Travis CI, and knowledge of configuration management systems like Puppet, Chef, Ansible or Salt are becoming boxes that must be ticked on a CV.  And with more and more projects going into the Cloud, knowledge of AWS is very nice to have.


Being hired into a DevOps role often involves a bewildering series of questions along the lines of your favourite tools, where you see the future, philosophical questions about subjects like immutable infrastructure versus configuration management, or how you would do a code release into production.  Knowing what Agile is in relation to DevOps is another popular interview question.


In practice, a DevOps engineer is just a fancy sysadmin.  If production is broken, or if a filesystem has filled, a DevOps engineer is the one expected to wear the sysadmin hat.  Really, a DevOps engineer is a sysadmin who has learnt not to configure or build infrastructure manually, but through a revision-controlled configuration management system.