The fastest way to ramp up on DevOps

Becoming a DevOps engineer is a journey that, most times, is self-paced and doesn't require you to enroll in a university or college. It's a journey that you can start and finish in a year or less, depending on your previous knowledge of cloud native technology. And suppose you probably don't know or have knowledge of anything cloud native before. In that case, you can still take these steps in becoming a DevOps engineer in a short time, depending on your tenacity to accomplish your goal. But first, let's explain what DevOps is and Who a DevOps engineer is.

What is DevOps, and who is a DevOps engineer?

DevOps is a "culture" adopted in an organization for the development teams and operations to share the pain of software development to achieve a common goal. DevOps has come to increase the rate of continuous delivery of software.

A DevOps engineer is an IT professional that oversees the software development life cycle and bridges the communication gap between the developments and operations team. Before becoming a DevOps engineer, you need to have adequate knowledge of the software development life cycle, with some must-have required skills as a DevOps engineer.

Steps to becoming a DevOps engineer

Becoming a DevOps engineer is such a straightforward step. As discussed earlier in this article, a DevOps engineer bridges the gap between the operations and development teams; you need to have an overall idea of what both teams do and how they do it. The steps below will point you in the right direction of becoming a DevOps engineer:

Linux and programming language fundamentals

As a DevOps engineer, you will need basic knowledge of Linux OS and basic programming language knowledge like Python. Linux is an operating system based on UNIX and is widely used in the DevOps space. Programming skills like Python are also needed to enable you to read and edit codes when the need arises and when you need to script and automate workloads.

Development, testing, and deployment of technology knowledge

Source code control knowledge is vital to be able to track the changes to code and the ability to collaborate with team members. Development and testing operations carried out will be through tools like Jenkins, Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, Git, Salt, Terraform etc., thereby making the knowledge of these tools important to acquire in your DevOps journey. You don't need to learn all these tools; just a few of them is enough.

Application monitoring and observability, and cloud providers

As a DevOps engineer, you need to know how to monitor applications' behavior and how it interacts with their environment. Monitoring is more about understanding the application and predicting what will happen to it at a particular time to come.

You will need to know how logging works, read application metrics, data tracing, service level indicators, service level objectives, and service level agreements.

It is best to know about cloud providers with all the knowledge above because most, if not all, of these infrastructures, are hosted on the cloud; therefore, a good understanding of cloud providers like GCP, AWS, etc., is needed.

Getting familiar with IaC

Practicing Infrastructure as Code is also part of the tasks to be carried out as a DevOps engineer. Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the approach of creating, managing, configuring, and updating your Infrastructure through codes instead of manually. In practicing IaC, you will need to state if you want a Declarative or Imperative IaC.

Getting familiar with CI/CD pipelines and IaC

This is one of the pillars of DevOps and an essential aspect of becoming a DevOps engineer because, as a DevOps engineer, you will need to carry out continuous integration of codes to the main branch before deploying through a CD pipeline.

The growth of automated development workflows has made software development and deployment more efficient. This equates to a better user experience, fewer development costs, and improved overall quality.

Continuous integration, continuous delivery, or continuous deployment is what CI/CD stands for.

Let's define what each of them is responsible for.

Continuous integration refers to the development of software, as well as the integration of components handled by individual developers and the build of packages and dependencies.

Continuous delivery: We require software releases now that the build and testing processes have been automated. Releases are the files that should be installed on test, staging, and production servers.

Continuous deployment: Application releases are distributed to the target environment in a continuous manner. Continuous deployment is nothing more than an extension of continuous delivery.

We’ve built WildCard, a developer-friendly platform that you can use to build complex pipelines in a few clicks. WildCard is a hassle-free CI/CD pipeline solution that will help you transform how you deliver your cloud-native applications. Start creating your CI/CD pipeline in minutes for free.

You don’t have to have 10 years of experience in software engineering to get started with CI/CD. We provide a NoCode platform that gets you started with continuous deployment without writing any code.

Becoming a DevOps engineer is an easy journey for any professional already involved or familiar with cloud technologies. However, it's still a journey that beginners can work their way up the chain—acquiring the succinctly described skills and knowledge from learning programming languages to knowing how cloud providers work will help anyone interested or passionate about becoming a DevOps engineer. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered with a platform that will make your DevOps journey easier!

You can use Wildcard to build, deploy, and manage applications without writing a single line of code. Start for free by singing using Github or GitLab.