Moving from System Administration and coming into DevOps Engineering seems more of a natural order for roles and also fits in with most of the skills that you already possess. The key areas that one needs to focus on when making this change in the role include Continuous Integration Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Infrastructure as code (IaC) and most importantly automation. In the shoes of a DevOps engineer, there’s an understanding that there will be a need to speed up the delivery pipeline while reliability and automation is enhanced.
1. CI/CD & Automation:
At the heart of DevOps practices is CI/CD. Therefore, mastering CI/CD tools such as Jenkins or GitLab CI, which are used for building, testing, and deploying applications, is essential. For example, one can learn how to set up pipelines using Jenkins, deploy jobs using different techniques, and integrate testing and deployments. Specifically, you would configure Jenkins so that once code is pushed into the repository, tests are triggered automatically, and upon success, a deployment to the staging environment occurs without any human intervention.
2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Infrastructure as Code is the practice of managing and provisioning the infrastructure through codification thus ensuring consistency and repeatability of environments. Terraform and Ansible are two tools that are very important in this case. Terraform is concerned with the provisioning and management of cloud infrastructure through declarative scripts such as building networks, AWS EC2 instances e.t.c while Ansible is about the deployment of software on configurations management for example Extending configurations and applications to several machines. Moreover, Do some works by simplifying your own Terraform configuration and Ansible playbooks to control your environment.
3. Scripting & version control: Developing software strategies is a crucial activity in DevOps, which focuses on automation. Scripting plays a significant role in this process, as it helps streamline tasks like norming, forcing, and cleaning. Additionally, understanding version control systems is essential, as every collaborative team requires one, such as Git. Proper version control ensures that all changes are tracked and managed effectively, facilitating smooth collaboration among team members.
