In the software industry, there has been a sufficient amount of research carried out about the various tools and techniques that are needed in order to provide software as per demand in the business. However, the human elements of DevOps skills have sadly not received close to the same level of attention or investment. This lack of suitable and skilled human resources has caused much friction and hindered digital transformation. This is primarily why DevOps upskilling is the need of the hour for businesses in the software development and information technology industries.
Let’s first briefly understand what exactly DevOps is all about. DevOps is essentially the amalgamation of practices, cultural ideologies and tools that help organisations to better perform in its task of providing software applications and services much faster and efficiently. It is a collaboration between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams who work together to automate the lengthy process of ‘code deployment-to-production’, making it faster and repetitive; thus saving time to market and using it to invest in adding quality. What this means is that DevOps plays a very important role in determining the capabilities and success rate of any organization. Customers in the application software industry are always asking for more and more updates, faster, efficient and user-friendly software. As an outcome, over the years, the whole universe of DevOps has been continuously and rapidly evolving to satisfy consumer demand.
Recently, DevOps Institute ran a survey which was titled ‘2019 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’,. In that report it outlined the most important, high-on-demand, and utterly beneficial DevOps skills and tools that were needed to transform the devops process in any enterprise or organisation. According to the survey, the most valued must-have skills that were agreed upon by the respondents were automation skills, soft skills (people skills) and process skills (technical) which are elaborated below. The respondents’ views made complete sense considering DevOps is basically focused on collaborative culture, automated processes, numbers and tools. Taking a leaf out of the survey, organizations looking to ace their DevsOps upskilling game need to realize that it is highly critical that they approach the upskilling and reskilling goals in a multi modular manner.
Upskilling in the workplace can have serious beneficial effects for any business. In a bid to assume certain methodologies and to extract full value from the resources and tools available, it is imperative to ensure the involvement of qualified people and that can only be achieved by upskilling and reskilling the workforce. Organizations looking to update their DevOps engineers need to concentrate on the multiple aspects to maintain steady growth in the market.
Leadership skills and soft skills
Since DevOps is a precise alignment of effective communication and collaboration between development and IT operations, it is only befitting that every DevOps engineer upgrades his/her soft skills or business skills. The role of the team consists of streamlining and transforming the functionality and reciprocity between its members and for this leadership skills are critical to establish harmony within the workings of the team.
Importance of collaborative culture
The workload will keep on rising if there is a lack of cooperation between the development and operation teams. This can wreak havoc when deadlines are not met and implementation of projects keeps getting delayed. Organizations need to re-think their office culture and work their best to adapt to a more collaborative culture spanning across industries. The goal should be to encourage employees to ensure better team management, collective efforts, better communication across the office hierarchy, leadership skills and problem solving abilities. Once all these are put in place, there will be unity among teams and the DevOps engineer will benefit the most as an outcome.
Automation
The prime factor point of DevOps upskilling is to shorten the length of time taken to release new software without jeopardizing on quality and efficiency. DevOps engineers have to constantly write new codes, run all the necessary tests, deploy the code to production and keep the information technology operations (ITOps) teams sometimes referred as TechOps teams updated on the outcome. This can be far more tedious if an organization is dependent on traditional models of operation. With DevOps skills, automating a large part of the above tasks makes great time-to-market (or releasing the software). In automating the process of code deployment, two new terms have surfaced – Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). CI is when all developers combine or integrate their code into one single repository which is regularly updated, and which then is checked by automated tests, while CD goes a step further to automate the software release process and deploy the code to production. In order to make the most of the CI/CD concept, developers need to perfect their DevOps upskilling and reskilling game.
Tools
The upward trend of DevOps has also given rise to a huge number of tools that help DevOps engineers with delivering better software with fewer bugs and better accuracy by automating the process. Some of the more popular DevOps tools are Git, Gradle, Puppet, Jenkins, Chef, and Splunk. Software engineers and developers need to be ahead of the curve and organizations must go all out to help them by making regular upskilling in the workplace mandatory. Only then will the DevOps teams be able to put the full potential of the new and beat tools that are constantly flooding the market.
Technical skills
Last but certainly not least, for any successful delivery, the most important technical metrics are speed/response time taken, agility and adaptability. DevOps engineers have to be conscious of these to ensure better code deployment and faster time to market. Adequate knowledge of cloud and analytics can add more value to the company and help during troubleshooting and problem solving steps.
The bottomline is organizations need to take urgent measures to help their employees upgrade their DevOps skills, thus enabling them to face any challenges that may arrive unexpectedly during the deployment process. Upskilling and reskilling is the perfect strategy to add more value to the company determine future success of the organisation and give a competitive advantage in the market.
References:
- How can organisations up their DevOps upskilling game,” Lipi Agrawal, 17 July 2019.
- “Dev Leaders Compare Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Deployment”
