In this blog, we’ll share some of the key skills, training and certifications required to learn DevOps and jumpstart your career in this lucrative field.
How to Learn DevOps: The Best Resources and Training to Support Your DevOps Career
Today, it’s imperative that companies move quickly to get their products to market. As a result, old methods for developing and deploying software applications just don’t cut it.
That’s where DevOps comes in. DevOps is a software engineering methodology that enables organizations to quickly develop, deploy and maintain their applications. It is a combination of development and operations teams working together to create the best possible software products.
DevOps is a lucrative career choice for IT professionals interested in software and application development. And with the rise in software demand and usage, many businesses are seeking out DevOps professionals to improve and speed up the delivery process.
In this blog, we’ll share some of the key skills, training and certifications required to learn DevOps and jumpstart your career in this lucrative field.
Why Should You Learn DevOps?
Agile software development encourages developers to spin up new applications quickly. But without DevOps in place, there’s no process guaranteeing your software will deliver all the features and functionalities you promise to customers.
DevOps ensures that the silos that sometimes exist between development, operations and quality assurance teams are broken down. It encourages operations and development staff to work together across the entire service lifecycle, from design through development to production support.
Instead of spending months testing and experimenting to ensure perfection at the onset, DevOps allows teams to test and fix problems in a fast, automated manner as they come across them.
Here are some common benefits of learning DevOps:
Company Benefits:
Increased productivity and effectiveness
Do you sometimes feel stuck waiting around for another employee to finish a task or fix an issue? Often, without DevOps, this becomes the case. With DevOps, you’ll be able to move forward with your tasks and stay productive because you’ll no longer have to wait for someone to finish their part.
Better collaboration between development and operations teams
The basis of DevOps is improving communication between operations, quality assurance and development teams. As a result, companies can produce a higher quantity of products within shorter amounts of time.
Software stability and quality
DevOps creates a high level of accountability for building and running applications that work as promised. And because DevOps increases the frequency of release cycles, IT teams can fix problems as soon as they arise, giving other staff more time to work on enhancing the product with innovative ideas. The cross-functionality of team members also helps build stability into software from the beginning.
Personal Benefits:
Better job opportunities
Because DevOps is a pretty new concept in IT, and some businesses are only just now introducing it into their company, the job market is flush with DevOps roles that few people can fill. So if you take the time to learn DevOps, you are opening yourself up to more positions and promising future growth.
Increased salary
Currently, DevOps is seen as a specialized skill, which means pay associated with any DevOps jobs will be higher than typical development or operations roles. DevOps professionals, in fact, have some of the highest salaries in the IT industry. A DevOps engineer in the U.S. makes more than $90,000 per year on average.
What Skills Do You Need for a Career in DevOps?
Now that you know the benefits of learning DevOps, here are a few of the important skills you need to learn to get started.
These are just a few of the many skills required for a successful DevOps career. But for DevOps beginners, this list is a solid starting point that you can build upon with training and certifications.
Automation Technologies and Tools
Automation is one of the key elements of DevOps. It fosters speed, accuracy and reliability across the development lifecycle. You’ll need to become familiar with how to automate the DevOps pipeline, from continuous testing and app performance monitoring to infrastructure settings and configurations.
A Programming Language
You should know at least one programming language before starting your DevOps career. You don’t have to learn a programming language that you hate — there are so many out there now that you can learn a language that fits your style and experience level. Regardless, the best DevOps engineers all have fundamental programming skills under their belt.
How to Write Scripts
Yes, there are quite a few tools on the market that can create scripts for you, but scripting plays a significant role in DevOps and is an important skill for any future DevOps engineer to know. Bash, Javascript and Python are useful scripting languages to start with.
Cloud Skills
DevOps and the cloud are intricately connected. The cloud provides a centralized platform to test and deploy code and ensures resources are easily monitored and optimized for cost. Whether you choose to focus on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or another cloud platform, knowing how to facilitate DevOps in the cloud is a vital skill.
Networking Basics
Take the time to understand networking so that you can deploy your software with a basic understanding of its infrastructure. Some important networking essentials include how to configure network settings, as well as how DNS, HTTP (and HTTPS), FTP and other protocols work.
Security Basics
Similar to networking, you need to know some of the fundamentals behind security. Safeguarding your newly released software and knowing how to spot potential security flaws in your code are just two security basics that you should have at least cursory knowledge of.
The Best DevOps Training
To gain access to each of the above skills and dive deeper into how to learn DevOps, you can and should take DevOps Institute certifications. Here are the top five DevOps certifications you should earn to get the best DevOps training:
The DevOps Foundation certification covers basic DevOps terminology to ensure everyone in the industry is on the same page in terms of best practices and language. You will gain an understanding of the foundational tenets of DevOps, such as communication, collaboration, automation and more.
The DevOps Leader certification is for people interested in driving DevOps management within their organizations. It teaches aspiring DevOps professionals how to implement the cultural change needed to drive DevOps within their organizations and how to manage the shift after it takes place.
Today’s organizations deal with a higher volume of change in a more complex tech environment leading to a higher risk of outages and incidents. IT teams must improve service reliability and system resiliency. With automation and observability becoming key factors for more efficient and rapid deployments, the SRE profile has become one of the fastest-growing job roles.
With the rising number of data breaches and increased emphasis on data privacy regulations, organizations must prioritize security and compliance measures in everyday workflows.
Students will learn how to plan for DevOps, use source control, scale Git for an enterprise, consolidate artifacts, design a dependency management strategy, manage secrets, implement continuous integration, implement a container build strategy, design a release strategy, set up a release management workflow, implement a deployment pattern, and optimize feedback mechanisms.
Prepare for Your DevOps Career With New Horizons
Pretty soon, DevOps will transition from being a “nice-to-have” skill to a necessary one. But even before that happens, you can get a headstart on other IT professionals by gaining real-world experience and earning the relevant certifications now.
With New Horizons’ training courses covering some of the most important topics in DevOps today, you can feel confident that you’ll be a DevOps professional in no time.
See all our DevOps courses