Want a Career in DevOps? A career in DevOps is engaging and provides much room for professional growth and development. Besides, their pay is good, and many young talented people decide to pursue a career as developers. However, basing your decision only on the benefits of a specific career path can backfire. You can easily find out that this is not the job for you and that your interests lie elsewhere.
Below you can find a few essential things you should know before you make your final decision to work in the DevOps industry.
What is DevOps?
Before we start, here is a brief introduction to DevOps. It’s short for development and operations, a new concept for collaboration between IT operations and app or service development teams. The ultimate goal is to boost efficiency across groups while ensuring continuous application or service delivery.
You can choose either side of DevOps. Whether you pursue a career as a software developer or IT expert, you will be a vital cog in this giant machine that has to work at the highest efficiency possible.
Security is a new standard
If you decide to work as a developer, you will have to learn to use several tools, such as SCA tools, to reduce operational risks. As an IT expert, you will implement the best IaC security practices to keep hackers and bots out of your systems.
Software and infrastructure security are becoming the golden standard in the DevOps industry. Whether working on solutions for individual or business clients, you’ll be entangled in the latest and best security measures. You will play an essential role in creating bulletproof infrastructure or applications, thus minimizing cybersecurity risks the company you work for and your clients are exposed to.
Finally, you will have to stay tuned to the latest cybersecurity sector developments to identify the relevant threats and discover the appropriate mitigation strategies.
You will have to continuously improve your knowledge
Since you are interested in technology, you probably know how fast technological advancement is. Some old technologies are being replaced with new ones, while others get continuous updates to extend their capabilities and functionalities. There are also emerging cutting-edge software and hardware solutions you’ll have to know how and when to use.
Simply put, a career in the DevOps industry won’t leave you idle at any point in time. You’ll learn about microservices, serverless infrastructure, Kubernetes, and more. While improving and learning new things will most often be a requirement made by your company, it’s also an effort you’ll make to become more competitive in the job market.
Certifications can help
If you are fresh out of college, you can get the impression that you are not yet prepared to pursue a career in the DevOps industry. This is quite normal, and your confidence will grow with time. In fact, you might need additional support to feel confident in your knowledge and skill sets. There are a few things that can help.
First, you can pursue various online DevOps courses to obtain certificates. DevOps courses can help you catch up with the latest and best practices, technology use cases, and DevOps workflows. Certificates can help you stand out from the crowd and find an excellent entry-level job in the niche.
Entry-level jobs include the following:
- Junior security software engineer;
- Junior DevOps engineer;
- Junior development operations tester;
- Junior infrastructure engineer.
If you think you need more experience, you should look for open internship positions.
Embrace automation
Since DevOps is all about efficiency and continuity, automation has found a perfect use case in the niche. If you are comfortable with automation tools, you will find this industry an ideal match for you. Automation in the industry is often used to automate server management and deployments.
There are numerous automation tools on the market. Some are platform specific, while others have cross-platform use cases. Brushing up on your knowledge of these tools will help you become an attractive DevOps job candidate.
In addition, you will have an excellent time onboarding with the company’s tech stack and experience fewer bumps during your adjustment period.
Conclusion
The DevOps industry is quite attractive right now, and there is nothing to suggest that anything will change in the foreseeable future. However, if you genuinely want to outshine the competition, you should know that you will have to pay close attention to security, use automation, obtain certificates, and be ready to devote a significant portion of your off-work time to learning new things.