What the work is
A DevOps engineer builds and runs the infrastructure that applications live on, and makes sure new versions ship quickly and without outages. They set up servers and cloud services, automate building, testing and deployment (CI/CD), package services into containers, watch monitoring and backups, and look after access security. The tools include Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab CI or GitHub Actions, and Terraform.
A typical day
Checking monitoring and any overnight alerts. Setting up a pipeline for the development team’s new service. Upgrading a database version to plan, with a way to roll back. Working out with the backend developers why a service’s response time went up. Documenting the changes.
How to start
- Get a solid grip on Linux, the command line and networking basics.
- Learn Git, Docker and the principles of CI/CD.
- Deploy your own app in a container and set up automatic deployment on every commit.
- Learn one cloud platform and the “infrastructure as code” approach.
Related professions
System administrator, backend developer, cybersecurity specialist, QA engineer.