DevOps roadmap

What is DevOps?

DevOps combines different practices, tools, concepts, and philosophies to increase the security, speed, and organization processes of releasing services and software applications compared to the old software development methods. It involves more teams that require collaboration and communication during the application development.

It uses different management processes that enable the operations team and software developers to adopt iterative development. The collaborative nature improves application workflow and ships applications with value. When implementing DevOps, you must create a culture that will push teams to use agile practices, focus on faster delivery of products, and more accountability for the outcomes. It also has security teams to improve the security of the development cycle.

How to become a DevOps Engineer

Becoming a DevOps engineer requires one to master different skills. Some of the skills range from deployment, development, and scripting. Most of the skills require practice for you to be good at them. We will look at steps one can follow to become a DevOps Engineer.

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1. Learning a programming language

You need to know how to program in different programming languages. One needs to understand the basic programming concepts like variables, loops, functions, inheritance, etc. DevOps engineers must understand some of the common programming languages like Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C, C++, Rust, Scala, and JavaScript.

It enables them to understand several approaches and allows them to debug and build automated and stable pipelines. Most companies prefer those who know scripting languages like Python. 

2. Operating System Concepts

You must understand how to use different operating systems like Linux, Windows, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Unix, RHEL, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Amazon Linux, CentOS. Most companies use Linux Operating System to deploy their applications. Most Amazon tools and software like Ansible and Chef use Linux while configuring master nodes.

Some Linux basics include file handling, system administration, text processing, network, etc. You should also learn how to set up Linux servers and monitor them. Other operating system concepts include sockets, multi-threads, and concurrency, dealing with process management. Most operating systems have different GUI, and one must understand how it works and how it can minimize some tasks.

One needs to know other operating systems concepts: memory storage, virtualization, I/O management, sockets, threads, and concurrency.

3. Live In Terminals

You must understand how to use all the terminal commands when working as a DevOps engineer. Some commands are used for text processing, system performance, process monitoring, etc. You must use the commands regularly to be good at them. You also have to understand Bash Scripting and how to use other terminals like Vim, Powershell, and Emacs. Examples of commands include:

• Network commands-nmap, iptables, netstat, traceroute, tcpdump, ping, etc.
• Processing monitoring commands-top, htop, ps, atop, isof
• Text manipulation commands- sed, grep, sort, unique, cart, egrep, fgrep, fmt, tr, wc, cut echo etc.
• System performance commands-iostat, sar, vmstat, etc.
• Other commands-systemtap, uname, df, history, etc.

4. Network, Security & Protocols

Most applications have different protocols that deal with receiving and transfer of data. DevOps engineers must understand how the protocols work. A DevOps engineer needs to learn network skills, including FTP, SSL, HTTP, DNS, IMPAS, Domain Keys, Port Forwarding, Emails, SSH, and other protocols. It helps in ensuring the software is secure, there are no flaws in the code, and understanding how to configure the application infrastructure network.

Understanding all the issues and risks a network can face, i.e., hackers intercepting and stealing the data transfer. Understanding all the network and security protocols helps in avoiding such issues.

5. Web Servers

DevOps engineers must learn how to set up and configure servers like Nginx, Apache, Tomcat, Caddy, and IIS. They should have other ideas about servers like caching, balancing, use of firewalls, and reverse proxy.

6. Infrastructure as Code

Some of the process that involves Infrastructure as Code involves the following:

• Containers. It involves creating virtual environments that host operating systems with different containers that host different applications that can use the same system resources and the same operating system. Common tools and software that can help you achieve this include Docker, LXC, Vagrant, and Kubernetes.
• Configuration Management. It helps in managing software and application configurations. One needs to understand how to manage server configuration when dealing with applications. Mostly done with the help of commands or by clicking on specific buttons. Several configuration management tools like Ansible, Salt, Chef, and Puppet that DevOps engineers can connect to the servers and perform any configuration changes using remote connections.
• Container Orchestration. It involves the DevOps engineers changing how they manage the container's lifecycle to ensure they use little effort when dealing with containerized services and workload. You can use them with microservices to improve the scaling of the applications. It automates most of the work, making the DevOps team build applications with speed and more agility. Some tools include Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Nomad.
• Service Mesh. It is a type of Infrastructure made in applications to control how different parts of applications can share data to avoid downtime issues and improve communication. The tools include Istio, Envoy, Consul, and Linkerd.
• Infrastructure Provisioning. Involves the processes and steps DevOps engineers take to manage data and resource access to ensure they are available to the system and end-users. Most provisioning happens on servers, networks, users, and services. Some of the tools used include Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation.

7. Monitoring

You must set up different monitoring methods to ensure all the services run without issues. You have to monitor the applications and infrastructure. There are several tools one can use for monitoring. They are:

Infrastructure monitoring- Nagios, grafana, Zabbix, Monit, Prometheus, Datadog, etc.

Application monitoring-Jaeger,AppDynamics,Instana,Opentracing,New Relic etc.

Logs management-Elastic Stack,Graylog,Splunk,Papertrail etc.

8. Cloud Providers

Since most of the app deployments happen in cloud-native environments. DevOps engineers must know how to configure and use the Cloud Providers. Common cloud providers include Linode, Vultr, Digital Ocean, and AWS.

9. CI/CD Tools

One has to understand continuous delivery and continuous integration theory and concepts. You must understand how to integrate and work with different tools to create good delivery pipelines. It makes the committing, deploying, testing, and building code that works well during the software releases.

The processes help automate code from several developers into one place. Some of the CI/CD tools used include Bamboo, Jenkins, TeamCity, Circle CI, Travis CI, Azure DevOps, Github Actions, Gitlab CI, etc. Continuous integration makes fixing bugs faster, improves the application quality, and less time you spend on software updates.

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Conclusion:

DevOps engineers use different frameworks and approaches to ensure easier and more secure deployment of applications. When learning to become one, you will have to learn different concepts that take more time for one to become proficient. There is a high demand for DevOps engineers, which has pushed more people to try it as a career as it also has a good salary.

When working at a company, the DevOps engineer must create a DevOps culture to ensure the operations align with the DevOps requirements. The article has helped you understand what you need to know in your progress toward becoming a DevOps engineer.

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