DevOps Roles: Which Of Them Is Your Dream?

At a time when IT professionals are desperate to become experts in DevOps, there is still a lot of confusion regarding what are the various DevOps roles. So, this blog is dedicated to bring more clarity regarding the team structure in companies implementing DevOps.

You might have always heard that, in DevOps, every person involved performs a common role: DevOps, which is a culmination of two practices: Development and Operations. But that, is farthest from the truth.

DevOps Practice 

In reality, DevOps practice emphasizes that, a ‘Dev’ guy should be able to perform the tasks carried out by an ‘Ops’ guy and an ‘Ops’ guy should be able to perform the tasks carried out by a ‘Dev’ guy.

Now that you know a DevOps professional is one with multiple skills, are you also wondering, what are the various tasks a DevOps professional is responsible for in his organization? If that’s the case, read on.

To actually understand this concept, you need to look at it from a different angle. If you put yourself in the shoe of a company implementing DevOps, then its easier to understand it because you have to assign various DevOps roles based on the requirement. 

DevOps Roles

Let me first list down the various roles along with their description.

1. DevOps Evangelist – The principal officer (leader) responsible for implementing DevOps
2. Release Manager – The one releasing new features & ensuring post-release product stability
3. Automation Expert – The guy responsible for achieving automation & orchestration of tools
4. Software Developer/ Tester – The one who actually develops the code and tests it
5. Quality Assurance – The one who ensures quality of the product confirms to its requirement
6. Security Engineer – The one always monitoring the product’s security & health

One important point to note here is that, a lot of these roles will involve a team or group of professionals like Software Developers/ Testers, Security Engineers & Quality Assurance. So you should think of these roles & their relation in the form of a hierarchy.

Based on the company’s requirement, even Automation Experts can have more than one person donning the role. So, let me talk more about each of these DevOps Engineer roles.

DevOps Evangelist

Like I mentioned earlier, this is the key role in DevOps. This role is assumed by a leader or that person who is responsible for ensuring that the DevOps strategy is implemented in the end-to-end development of the product, while bringing about a positive difference in the environment.

The DevOps Evangelist also finds ways to improve the existing architecture of the product keeping in mind the various automation tools available and the skills that ‘Dev’ and ‘Ops’ guy consist of. Managing other DevOps roles and obtaining full efficiency from the team is his primary target.

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Release Manager

This role is a key player in the product deliverables because he needs to integrate the new/ updated features with the existing framework. This role can either be the same guy assuming the role of Release Engineer or a Release Manager who is leading a team of Release Engineers.

This role’s key area of focus is to co-ordinate and manage the product from development through deployment. Since this role is involved in an important manner, it should be donned by a technical person (manager) that understands how technology works and how various structures fall in place.

Depending on the requirement, there will be multiple Managers leading their respective teams working on multiple features (projects). 

Automation Expert

The importance of this role need not be emphasized again because DevOps is all about automation. And being an automation expert, this role should be able understand what can be automated and how a product stack can be integrated with another product stack.

This role which is also called Integration Specialists, analyzes, designs, and implements strategies for continuous deployments while ensuring high availability on production and pre-production systems.

Software Developer/ Tester

This role(s) does the actual root-level development of the software. The traditional coders and programmers fall under this bracket. Besides development, the professionals are also responsible for testing the code.

The designation may remain the same, but the new role of software developer/tester dramatically increases the scope of responsibilities as they are responsible not only for turning new requirements into code, but unit testing, deployment, and ongoing monitoring as well.

Quality Assurance

This is the new role introduced in DevOps, which actually guarantees the quality of the product. Often also referred to as Experience Assurance, this role is a step beyond traditional testing and quality checking.

Here, the functionality of the product is tested to its limits to bring out every flaw and to improve on the under performance of every standalone feature because the experience of your client matters. This role is always in the lookout for opportunities to improve any and every feature to bring customer satisfaction.

Security Engineer

Security Engineers are as important as any other role because they are the one’s monitoring the deliverability of the product. They work side by side with developers, embedding their recommendations (security patches) much earlier on in the process.

Besides external security, they also monitor the systems to check its performance, report any downtime faced by the system and drill down to find out what caused it. Preventing any downtime or security risk from happening again is a key task of Security Engineers. 

I hope by now you got a good understanding of the various DevOps roles that can exist in an organization.

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