How to Become a DevOps Engineer in 2023? An Easy Guide

DevOps, or Development of Operations, has become an integral part of the IT industry. It has become one of the sought-after skills in the software industry as it undergoes digital transformation. Organizations are embracing DevOps ideologies, principles and toolchains to ensure uninterrupted delivery of software applications and infrastructure. 

DevOps plays a key role in breaking down barriers between developers for creating applications and IT personnel tasked with deploying them. This fosters collaboration throughout the software development journey.

Table of Contents 1. What is a DevOps Engineer? 2. Expertise Required to Become a DevOps Engineer 3. Understanding the Role of a DevOps Engineer 4. How to Become a DevOps Engineer?

What is a DevOps Engineer?

A DevOps Engineer is an IT professional who oversees code releases and deployments in collaboration with software developers, system operators (SysOps), and other production IT staff. From coding and deployment to maintenance and code updates, a DevOps Engineer introduces processes, tools, and techniques to stabilize needs throughout the software development life cycle.

In simple terms, a DevOps Engineer is responsible for the development operations of an organization. They ensure smooth collaboration between the development and operations teams. Their primary aim is to increase the speed and quality of delivering applications and services.

Expertise Required to Become a DevOps Engineer

• An expert in software who can bridge the gap between development, QA and IT operations. 
• Someone who can oversee code releases and deployments, implement automation tools, monitor systems, and help companies achieve rapid production of software through CI/CD pipelines. 

• Knowledge of containerization is a must. Hands-on expertise using monitoring tools to gain observability into systems is invaluable. Knowledge of cloud platforms is also highly desirable. 
• Soft skills in communication, collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving are key if you are wondering, “How can I become a DevOps Engineer?”. 

With the right mindset and a structured learning approach focused on mastering technical and non-technical skills, you can successfully transition into the role of an expert. The demand for qualified DevOps Engineers far outweighs the supply, with the average salary exceeding well over $130,000 per year in countries like the US.

Understanding the Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer

The role of a DevOps Engineer is diverse, requiring technical and non-technical skills. Here are some of the important responsibilities handled by a DevOps Engineer:

• Managing the IT infrastructure to enable software code to run in dedicated, multi-tenant, or hybrid cloud environments.
• Providing resources, selecting acceptable deployment strategies, and implementing testing procedures to validate each release.
• Developing plans and processes for improvement and expansion of the current technologies used.
• Automating configuration management processes, monitoring systems, and IT service management.
• Communicating operational requirements and forecasts between departments.
• Performing gap analysis to identify performance enhancements and alternate solutions.
• Collaborating with developers to complete coding and scripting to link application components and tools required in the software release cycle.
• Building and maintaining tools for deployment, monitoring, and operations.
• Troubleshooting and debugging system issues.
• They are enforcing security policies across infrastructure and applications.

As evident from the above responsibilities, DevOps Engineers must have diverse technical and soft skills to succeed.

How to Become a DevOps Engineer?

Becoming a DevOps Engineer requires developing expertise across various technical skills. Here are the key steps to become a DevOps Engineer:

1. Learn Programming Languages

Having strong programming skills is essential to become a DevOps Engineer. You must be proficient in at least one mainstream programming language like Python, Java, Ruby, etc.

Focus extensively on mastering core programming concepts, including:

• Object-oriented programming – Classes, objects, inheritance, encapsulation, abstraction, polymorphism
• Writing clean, maintainable code – Modular design, loose coupling, high cohesion, DRY principle, commenting, code formatting
• Data structures and algorithms – Arrays, lists, stacks, queues, trees, graphs, searching, sorting, complexity analysis
• API integration – Designing REST APIs, RPC APIs, working with Postman, Swagger, and HTTP methods

Learn how to link together various application components using APIs and SDKs efficiently. This will enable you to collaborate more effectively with developers on coding tasks.

Spend time building side projects to practice coding skills. Contribute to open-source projects on GitHub. These will significantly boost your programming expertise.

2. Knowledge of Version Control Systems

Expertise in version control systems (VCS) like Git and GitHub is critical for a DevOps Engineer. It would help if you had an in-depth understanding of:

• Git commands – init, add, commit, push, pull, branch, merge, rebase
• Managing source code in a Git repository locally and on GitHub
• Committing code changes and pushing to remote repos
• Creating and merging feature branches for parallel development
• Resolving merge conflicts

Hands-on experience with Git workflows is essential. Set up repositories to practice branching, merging, and pull requests. This will strengthen your VCS skills.

Other popular VCS tools you should learn beyond Git include SVN, CVS, and Mercurial. Having experience with at least one version control system is a must.

Mastering Git and GitHub will enable you to efficiently collaborate with developers during the software development lifecycle as a DevOps Engineer. Invest significant time to develop rock-solid version control skills.

3. Learn the Applicability of Linux & OS Concepts 

Since most companies use Linux-based infrastructure to deploy apps and services, strong Linux skills are essential to succeed as a DevOps Engineer. It would help if you had in-depth expertise in:

• Bash and shell scripting – Writing scripts for task automation using variables, loops, conditional logic
• Linux commands – grep, sed, awk, vim, ssh, top, ps, kill, sudo, chmod etc.
• Linux filesystem – Structure, file permissions, processes, disks, partitioning
• Linux networking – iptables firewall, SSH, HTTPD, DNS, DHCP
• Linux services – MySQL, Apache, Nginx, Docker, Kubernetes
• Linux security – SELinux, AppArmor, certificates, encryption, hardening
• Linux troubleshooting – Logs analysis, memory analysis, connection troubleshooting
• Linux internals – Kernel, init system, devices, interprocess communication

If you want Linux experience, spend time going through online courses, tutorials, and boot camps focused exclusively on Linux administration and operations. Understand key OS concepts that apply across operating systems, like process management, memory management, I/O management, etc.

4. Know How Software Configuration & Deployment Tools Work

DevOps Engineers need to know how to configure infrastructure and applications using tools efficiently:

• Ansible – Agentless configuration management and deployment
• Puppet – Powerful data centre and cloud provisioning
• Chef – Infrastructure automation with recipes
• SaltStack – Secured remote task execution

These configuration management and orchestration tools help massively in:

• Automated server provisioning in data centres or the cloud
• Application deployment across environments
• Overall IT process management

It would help if you also had expertise with containerization tools like Docker and Kubernetes that package apps into containers along with dependencies and deploy them seamlessly across environments.

Overall, a DevOps Engineer must have very strong knowledge of release management patterns like Blue-Green, Canary, and automated deployment pipelines.

Focus on getting experience with as many enterprise-grade configuration management, container orchestration and workload deployment tools as possible. This will accelerate your journey to becoming an expert DevOps Engineer.

5. Explore the Workings of Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as code (IaC) allows you to manage the entire infrastructure through code instead of manual configurations. As a DevOps Engineer, you need to learn IaC tools thoroughly:

• Terraform – Provision infrastructure on multiple platforms
• CloudFormation – Infrastructure management on AWS
• Pulumi – Modern infrastructure as code

The key benefits of infrastructure as code include:

• Consistent and efficient infrastructure provisioning
• Version control for infrastructure configuration
• Automated testing and validation frameworks
• Scalable infrastructure management

So, DevOps roles must develop expertise in declarative programming using JSON/YAML and mastery over leading IaC tools.

With IaC, you can treat your infrastructure configuration as another application codebase. You can instantiate or tear down infrastructure as needed through code. This brings the same benefits of coding – revision history, peer reviews, testing, etc. to your infrastructure.

Spend time learning Terraform in-depth, as it is the most widely used open-source IaC tool. Build Terraform modules to provision AWS/Azure resources like VPCs, subnets, load balancers, etc. Use Terraform CLI for tasks like init, plan, and apply. This will give you hands-on IaC experience.

6. Understand How to Set Up CI/CD Pipelines

To automate your software delivery lifecycle, you need in-depth expertise in setting up continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. CI/CD helps you ship code changes frequently, reliably and rapidly.

Invest time mastering CI/CD tools like:

• Jenkins – Leading open-source automation server
• CircleCI – Automate the software development cycle
• TravisCI – Test and deploy with confidence
• GitHub Actions – Automate from within GitHub

Understand how to create pipelines, including:

• Automated building, testing of code
• Deployment across multiple environments
• Zero-downtime releases using Blue-Green or Canary
• Centralized logging and monitoring

Hands-on experience with real-world CI/CD workflows is a huge plus for aspiring DevOps Engineers.

Set up a simple CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins or GitHub Actions that pulls source code, builds and packages the app, runs automated tests, and finally deploys the built artefacts to a test server. This will give you immense clarity on CI/CD concepts.

Having expertise in CI/CD pipelines allows you to enable the continuous delivery of software features as a DevOps Engineer through automated build, test and deployment processes.

7. Dive into the World of Networking & Security

Since DevOps Engineers deploy applications across distributed systems, having strong networking and security knowledge is critical. You need to learn:

• TCP/IP model, IP addressing, subnets, routing, common protocols
• Network virtualization concepts like VLANs, VXLANs,
• Container and cloud networks – CNI, ingress controllers, service mesh
• Encryption – Symmetric (AES), asymmetric (RSA), hashing algorithms
• VPNs, firewalls – Site-to-site VPN, SSL VPN, iptables, WAFs
• Authentication – LDAP, SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect
• Authorization – RBAC, ABAC, ACLs

Getting networking certifications like Network+ or CCNA validates your skills. Know common security tools like Nmap, Wireshark, Burp Suite, and OWASP ZAP.

Being able to troubleshoot connectivity issues, analyze network traffic, and implement proper network security controls is crucial for DevOps Engineers.

8. Know How Automation, Monitoring, and Other Tools Can Help You

As a DevOps Engineer, you need expertise with various open-source tools for:

• Automation – Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, Packer
• Container Orchestration – Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Nomad
• Monitoring – Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, Nagios
• Logging – Fluentd, Logstash, Graylog, Splunk
• Messaging – Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis

AWS services like EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail are also valuable to learn.

It would help if you focused extensively on:

• Infrastructure automation using IaC and configuration management
• Container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes
• Metrics monitoring, logging and data visualization

Building skills in these areas will enable you to set up automated and self-healing infrastructure, mature monitoring and observability platforms.

Set up monitoring for a sample application using Prometheus and Grafana. Send application logs to Elastic stack and analyze them in Kibana. Containerize an app using Docker and deploy it on Kubernetes. This hands-on experience with DevOps tools is invaluable.

Want to know why AWS services in the DevOps methodology? Check out our AWS DevOps Training to advance your career!

9. Explore Different Cloud Providers and Services

Most companies extensively leverage public cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and GCP. So it would help if you had broad and deep expertise on:

• Cloud architecture patterns – Microservices, event-driven, serverless
• Cloud infrastructure deployment – EC2, VPC, IAM, Load Balancing
• Cloud security and compliance – Encryption, WAF, DDoS protection, auditing
• Core services from providers – S3, Lambda, SQS, CloudWatch, Azure Functions
• Cost optimization – RI utilization, auto-scaling, downsizing

Getting certified as an AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or Azure DevOps Engineer validates your cloud skills.

Let’s look at some key skills associated with top cloud service platforms: 

	1. EC2 – Virtual Servers 2. VPC – Isolated Cloud Networks 3. S3 – Object Storage 4. IAM – Access Control 5. CloudWatch – Monitoring & Analytics
	1. Virtual Machines – Infrastructure as Service 2. Virtual Network – Private Cloud Networking 3. Storage Accounts – Unstructured Data 4. Key Vault – Secrets Management 5. Monitor – Infrastructure Monitoring
	1. Compute Engine – Virtual Machines 2. VPC Networks – Global Cloud Networking 3. Cloud Storage – Object Storage 4. IAM – Access Control 5. Cloud Operations – Monitoring, Logging, Debugging

Hands-on experience deploying infrastructure on the cloud using Terraform or CloudFormation is invaluable. Containerize applications and deploy them on Kubernetes clusters across cloud environments.

Gaining this first-hand experience with public cloud platforms enables you to architect and operate solutions leveraging the cloud as a DevOps Engineer.Following these steps and developing expertise in the above areas, you can successfully build the skills to become a DevOps Engineer this year. Look at some common FAQs related to becoming a DevOps Engineer next.

Final Words

Becoming an expert DevOps Engineer requires developing proficiency across various technical and non-technical skills. On the technical side, you need expertise in programming languages, version control systems, cloud platforms and containerization technologies. 

To advance in your career, it’s important to learn and improve through taking DevOps course, earning certifications and working on projects. By utilizing the wealth of resources available, motivated individuals in the technology field can acquire the skills to become a DevOps Engineer by 2023. 

If you are wondering how to become a DevOps Engineer, you must note that it takes consistent effort over 3-5 years. But it is rewarding, as you will be at the forefront of bringing development and operations together through joint efforts and automation.

FAQs

1. How long does it take to become a DevOps Engineer?

It can take 3-5 years to gain the necessary skills and experience to become an expert DevOps Engineer. The learning curve varies based on your background.

Software developers can become DevOps Engineers faster by learning operations skills. Similarly, sysadmins can progress by picking up development and automation skills. Getting an internship is a good way to accelerate your journey.

2. What is the average salary of a DevOps Engineer in India?  

According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a DevOps Engineer in India is ₹662,500 per year. DevOps Engineers in metro cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, and Hyderabad earn 20-30% higher than other cities. Multinational companies offer premium salaries compared to Indian firms. 

3. How to become a DevOps Engineer from scratch? 

Here are the fundamental steps to become a Devops Engineer:

• Learn a programming language like Python
• Develop Linux and Bash scripting skills
• Get familiar with Git version control
• Understand CI/CD and DevOps processes
• Get certified in AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
• Create DevOps projects for practice
• Join DevOps communities online
• Apply for internships or junior DevOps roles

Gaining hands-on experience is key to entering and advancing in the DevOps field along with technical expertise, focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills.