What is DevOps? - Not a Person

If someone would like to hire me for a role of DevOps Engineer, they probably think “What does a DevOps person do?”

It’s important to remember that DevOps is a methodology first, and only secondary, DevOps is a role.

We should stop labeling people as “DevOps Engineers”, as it clearly doesn’t define a skill set one may be looking for.

In other words, it is a methodology that allows us to deliver quality code at a higher velocity, by essentially saying “works on my machine” phrase to our colleagues less often.

Let’s just ask ourselves, what is the exact skill set of a “DevOps Engineer”? Typical options could be:

1. Software Engineer with some System Admin skills
   • 70% Writing Product Code
     • NodeJS Backend
     • AWS Lambda for product’s data processing
     • A bit of ReactJS
   • 30% Managing Operations:
     • CI/CD using canned solutions like AWS Amplify or Netlify.
     • Some infrastructure (simple click-through, nothing like a cohesive Infrastructure as Code).
     • Some monitoring, inherently with alert fatigue.
     • Docker (to some extent, usually huge unoptimized images as a result).
2. System Admin with some Software Engineering skills
   • 70% Operations
     • Cohesive Infrastructure as Code.
     • Complex and complete CI/CD via Jenkins, Github Actions, Gitlab and other industry-standard tools.
     • Docker best practices: multi-stage builds, size-optimized images and solid twelve-factor app methodology implementation.
   • 30% Software Engineering
     • NodeJS, Python, Golang backend (performance, scalability, monitoring)
     • Dependency & Security management

Given these two options it’s quite hard (if not impossible) to nail all of them in one rigid job title, to answer a question “What is DevOps”?

Of course, there are other points of view, so it would be interesting to learn yours. Let me know in the comments section!

Post photo by @patkrupa