What does a DevOps engineer do?

30 December 2015 · Filed in Development Testing Infrastructure

Within a project team you require a number of skills usually found across a number of team members.

Developer - This is the programming and design skill required for the end product this project is sponsored to deliver. For a web application, this might be Javascript, PHP, Paintshop etc. For a data analysis BI team, these skills will be more like R, tableaux or Qlikview.

Testing - These skills are about ensuring the best experience for the end user or customer of the deliverables. Performance (the speed of the product), usability (if it actually works as designed) and load testing (how many users or how much data can be provided) are important measurements in this area.

Operations - Providing the IT bits that the project and application rely on to function and serve. These are concerned with the servers, networks and other dependencies.

In terms of what DevOps engineers do, well that spans the developer and operations skills. The reason it is so specialist, is the blend of these skills. Someone who understand programming and infrastructure.

My team and I spend the majority of our time, writing and refining puppet modules. These are definitions of what a server needs to do, in order to provide a server, service or piece of infrastructure. They are programs in their own right.

We also spend time on writing tools to help the developers and testers move through the deployment processes. We don't want to slow the development or project down, so providing tools to enable the developers and testers to 'self serve' allows that flexibility.

Automation of the project steps and providing tools, buttons, one-click actions, to move the project and help the developers write, test and deploy code as easily as possible.

 

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